She blinked ten times again and thought for a moment. Her mind had gone blank. Something like five hours had passed and Cathy sat hunched over an old, slick keyboard hooked to the computer in her bedroom. It was a heaving and horrible thing that made a screech every time she turned it on, and now it was rumbling away, keeping half the apartment block awake. The sooner she could afford a proper PC, the better. For now, she was putting up with her mom’s old model from 2025 or around then, and it was practically ancient. It was a wonder at all how she had fit her flash drive into it. Cathy leaned in to stare at the bottom of her coffee mug. It was empty, it always seemed to be when she needed it most. Then it came, like a rush straight into her fingers and she jumped to continue her work:

Gizmo fig = new Gizmo();
fig.name = “Fig”;
fig.threshold = inf;

Every one of these creatures she created was a gizmo, at least that’s what she called them. Entities made purely of code, artificial intelligence designed to live in a digital environment. Now what else was there to do? She was getting impatient and stared at the code block as it blinked back, all the thousands of lines of it. While most of it had just been a copy-and-paste job from the last few gizmos she had worked on, it had nonetheless taken too long, and she was hopping to run it soon. She ended the code block and thought one last time. Anything else to add? No. It was done, and she slapped the mouse button to kick it all into play.

A cry came from the machine, and it almost shook itself off the table. The screen flickered, and a fan hidden somewhere in the hardware’s great husk whirred into a frenzy. Cathy fell back into her chair and swivelled around a little, throwing her eyes to the ceiling. She had heard this whole cacophony many times before, and it was grating on her. “Loading program…” read in the console onscreen, and as it worked away, Cathy fiddled with one of the rings she was wearing, taking it on and off again and rubbing her fingers around it. She glanced back to the screen and threw her eyes wide open as the process began, and every line of code streamed down the window. These set every characteristic for the gizmo, like a string of DNA; what it looked like, how fast it could move, if it could move at all, and so much more.

The modem shook louder than ever before, but now Cathy was just blocking it out. She grasped the arms of her chair and poked her tongue out just a little in anticipation, playing a bit with a lip piercing as the noises grew greater. One last line, all she needed to see was that one last line, then she would know it had succeeded. Her breathing slowed, and Cathy dared not to blink. Then the rumbling ceased, and the fan fell in pitch. Everything went near-silent after that, just the hum of the room echoed now. There it was, that last line. Cathy didn’t move, her eyes just darted to her flash drive, still and silent sticking out of the port. It was flashing.

With a careful manoeuvre, Cathy detached the drive and cupped it in the palm of her hand. It was warm, and a faint buzz died within it as the last few traces of intense energy seeped away. The computer went to sleep, and she was left alone in the darkness of her room, only the dim early morning illuminating the device in her hand. Cathy didn’t need to force a grin, it came naturally, and she yawned with tired relief.
“Fuck me,” she muttered. A bit more relaxed now, Cathy fell backwards into a slouch and tossed the stick around between her fingers. The plastic clinked against two other rings she was wearing, and then a third, and Cathy gripped the drive tightly, making sure to disassemble it with care. The top came off easy, and her other hand was ready to catch a tiny chip sliding out. It was disc-shaped, a tiny chip with every line of the gizmo’s code locked within it. It had a glossy metal casing and must have been only half the size of one of her fingernails. This flat, tiny thing was what she’d been slaving over instead of sleeping, and Cathy took a moment to enjoy it as the little chip was nudged around her palm by her thumb. It was so light, like a tiny feather, like it was not even there at all. On closer inspection, there was also a small screen on one side, only wafer thin, that displayed little colours and lines that dashed about as if a part of some hypnotic game. Cathy waited, and after a minute or two, these lines took shape. They became a teensy little figure, shaped very much like a human, and Cathy stared at it smiling as it stared back out.

It looked right out from its 2-dimensional home, blinking a bit with dots for eyes, then it wandered over to the side of the screen and started poking at other digital chunks. Cathy loved it when her gizmos came to life, it usually went according to plan and this one seemed as active as she’d hoped. It might have appeared quite simple, but this little blip of data in her hand was using more energy than every smartphone combined back in 2020. It would need all that energy to simulate a sentient program like this, capable of being just as smart as she was. She spent an affectionate thirty seconds thinking of a name for this gizmo: “Fig”, it sounded cute to her. As for the others, they all had names of their own and Cathy kept them close to her all the time.

For a while she just watched it, fascinated with its movements left and right, up and over things in its small enclosure. Fig couldn’t break beyond the four walls around it, so Cathy could see it no matter where it waddled, and she knew that Fig was learning like they all did. While the earlier ones could only do basic tasks, recent gizmos had done some impressive things: Built their own little houses, made clever contraptions to reach high places, one gizmo even made a rudimentary pair of wings for itself at one point. Leaving Fig on for hours could result in who knows what. Cathy thought about it long and hard, this time it could be different; she could just leave Fig to its own devices. Fondling her necklace and scrunching her face into a scowl, she considered what to do.

By now, sunlight was breaching in through the curtains. The first murmurs of activity came as birdsong and the quiet rev of a distant engine. Cathy remained in her chair, swinging around in a circle. She gazed around the bedroom for a sign of what to do, her bed, then a shelf of books and games, her feet skidding along the carpet with the fibres of her fluffy socks getting caught in it every so often. Then she stopped. Cathy looked to the floor, simply watching her socks wiggle and shake as her toes moved around inside them. She realised, with a pit of butterflies in her stomach, that she was just stalling. Cathy knew what she wanted to do, she knew it all along, the purpose she had created every gizmo for in the first place. Why was she so afraid? She had done this before, many times indeed. Perhaps it was less about nerves and more sheer excitement, she wanted this feeling of delighted anticipation to last. Cathy smirked, and she swivelled around a bit more with Fig’s little chip catching in the wrinkles of her palm. She gleamed at how small it was, it looked adorable, and her lips parted before she could realise it, curving her mouth into a dimpled smile. The two socked feet thumped down firm into the ground, and Cathy gained controlled – her smile became thin, her eyes centred in on the disc, her hand became flat and motionless. The only thing she could not restrain was her heartbeat, frantic. The world seemed to go silent as she spoke, clear and calm:
“Begin.”

The silence returned immediately, as though Cathy’s voice had been a single spark, and for a moment the darkness had retreated. She kept her eyes tight-fixed on the tiny screen in her hand, watching as a pivotal segment of code activated. The whole flat world before her began to morph. Masses of digital hills and stones wobbled, shaking and crumbling into tinier fragments with Fig left in the middle watching on. As the last mounds fell apart and what looked like smoke rose up, Cathy leaned in closer, moving the chip to clutch it between two fingers. Her breaths became deep and groggy, and she bit her bottom lip, trapping the piercing behind her teeth. A fiery blaze suddenly lifted out of the ground and consumed the world between Cathy’s fingers. In respect to Fig, these were massive columns of red inferno, setting the gizmo ablaze and burning the helpless victim. The whole screen brightly glowed hot amber, and if Fig’s flailing was any indicator, it was incredibly unbearable.

Cathy’s toes gripped the carpet as her free hand moved down to her crotch. The brighter the flames licked, the closer Cathy bent in to see, and she shuffled restless in her seat. Just as quick as the flames had come, they died into nothing and the screen went black for a second. The tiny gizmo lay motionless at the bottom of the world, only to succumb to a sudden burst of bright blue. The whole disc that at one time seemed to contain an entire sun now was the opposite, a blizzard of pixelated snows and ice, and Fig stopped in place, left twitching in freezing agony. This went on for another few seconds before it switched back to extreme heat again, and then cold, and then heat, constantly, quicker and quicker. Within five minutes, the extremes were shifting every second. Fig was trapped between two unbelievable pains, one too cold to bear and one too hot, and all of this happened on that speck of a screen. Cathy just felt herself the whole time, watching without mercy or any emotion other than pure joy. She thought to herself how good it was that Fig’s damage threshold had been set to limitless. No matter the pain, the gizmo would remain perpetually alive and awake. It wasn’t even possible that Fig could perish, it wasn’t in the code.

Cathy enjoyed every moment of this. Even if she could barely see it up close, she felt pleasure in the knowledge that a soul was being tortured in her clutches, and it was all because of her, it was all about her. She laboured hours at a time to write the code for each gizmo, a personalised torture for each one, work that was hard but worth it to make her feel good. As she fell back into ease and released all the tension, Cathy sat up and gazed at it for a while, the mess of flashes. Mesmerising, terrifying, she wondered how it must feel and that thought made her cower, it was a wonderful feeling and one she looked forward to every time she activated one of these. She only wished she could hear it, the sound of what was happening down there, a symphony of pure terror she imagined, and she felt like touching herself all over again. However, restraint returned, and she shivered, turning the seat right around to face the desk again. She tapped a finger on the wood near the keyboard, relaxing to the beat of each smack, and all attention landed on a pretty, blue box resting on the table.

Snapped open, a chain bracelet was revealed inside resting on a bed of fabric, a simple thing with silver shades to it and a clasp where a jewel should have been, yet it was empty. Raising it out from the box, Cathy felt the double rope chain through her hands and twirled the jewellery round her thumb, inspecting how the light danced along her skin. The gizmo chip would do nicely in this chain, this would be its new home, not that Fig would notice. Gentle to balance the flashing chip at an angle, it slipped through the clasp and into the bracelet, shaken by Cathy as she wedged it deeper into a secured fix. Now it was a part of the jewel piece, and the screen shone out better than any glinting stone she could think of. Wrapping it tighter around her hand, Cathy slipped the bracelet down around her wrist, twisting it to get a better view of her creation and masterpiece, the world she was god over – and Fig kept burning, in a deep and dangerous red that merged with bleeding blue pixels, and Cathy stared at it a little bit longer. The chair slid back under the desk where it belonged as she bounced up, gliding over to throw back the curtains then falling to the bed.

Fig was soon off her mind, Cathy was already considering other things. What next? She wondered what other malevolent torments she could create with some lines of code. Just thinking about it gave her joy, she was truly happy now and in her element. She didn’t want to stop. Throwing her hair back, a pair of dangling earrings and another odd one flung back too, coming back and tapping into the side of her neck with a subtle clink. One of them had even been thrown into a loop all the way around her ear, and now it dangled on top of it. For a brief time, she remembered them, all experiencing their own dread and pain, over and over in strange and cruel ways; all the gizmos trapped in her earrings. She stuck her tongue out and dabbed it a little against the metal in her lip again, feeling it, the heat of the immense energy seeping from the chip planted in the piercing. She turned to a mirror and saw the tiny screen hanging from her lip, and the gizmo inside, trapped with no escape. She looked down to her necklace, a long string from which two more gizmos hung, swaying permanently and precariously above the gap between her breasts, one so low down it could be hidden beneath many of her shirts. Still, she spied another cheeky screen blaring, so faint you wouldn’t see it unless you knew it was there. It hung from a piercing in her bellybutton, one Cathy liked especially, and she rolled her clothes up to bend down and smile into it. She could imagine there was nothing being returned but screaming, and it only made her smile grow wider. She nudged it a little with a finger, cold and ticklish, then she dropped her shirt back down to half hide it. Her hands had now caught her attention.

She wore four rings, perhaps too many but she was worth it. None of them minded being decoration on her body anyway. At least, that’s what she teased them by saying, and she liked to think they understood every word she said. She waved her fingers about and kissed each little screen, squinting into each one with a grimace. They had to know she hadn’t forgotten about them after all. They’re purpose was clear; to give her pleasure. On the last gizmo chip, fitted into a small ring around her pinkie finger, she peered in and recalled it as one of her first. She had put this gizmo through so much, so many kinds of undeserved punishments, and when she grew tired of it, she damned it to be completely alone in every way. “Teenee”, as she had dubbed it, was reconfigured to have no sights, sounds, touches, or anything else in its chip, left utterly hopeless in some dark abyss that only its thoughts occupied. She wondered from time to time how Teenee was doing, but it never grew into any real concern. This gizmo was always just the forgotten one trapped around her left pinkie.

She finally looked down to see her own personal favourite gizmos, even if no one ever saw them other than herself. Fluttering her toes like before and slipping her cotton socks off, Cathy gently swept both to the side in a pile, dark marks stained into the material where her soles had been pressed up against them for weeks-worth of wear. Little white pieces of fluff were still stuck between her toes, and they glinted with light beside her two toe rings. On each ring, two screens were affixed, each depicting a different dark world haunted by constant, never-ending torture.
“How’re you doing down there, guys?” she giggled, wiggling her toes without any effort at all. Specks of sock lint, some even bigger than the depictions of the gizmos onscreen, toppled down and stuck to some chips. One screen was even completely obscured by a flake of dirt that fell onto it. Cathy couldn’t keep it in any longer, a light laugh that only made her feet shake even more. For a moment she thought about turning off one of the chips on a toe ring. Just to give them relief, even just one of them. She slipped two fingers down and caressed a puny button on the side of a chip’s panel, a single press would cut out the lights and delete whatever gizmo was inside. She looked carefully, raising her foot up to rest on the edge of the blankets, and crouched in so hard it hurt too see it better. All she saw were countless tiny flickering lights onscreen, unlike any other gizmo chip. Cathy was confused for a second and rose her toe to get a better look, slipping the musty ring off to inspect – now she recognised it. This one had been made about a year ago and was consistently on ever since. She had been looking for an efficient way to have as many gizmos as she wanted with as few resources as possible. Using an algorithm ripped from the internet, Cathy had created a rudimentary way to make simulated chips within chips. Onscreen, an infinite number of these identical, digital chips each contained a gizmo called “Jam” being constantly tortured by a pixelated monster. It tore the gizmo apart, before putting it back together and repeating. Cathy had quickly grown unentertained of this one however, as she found infinite clones of the same gizmo going through the same torment in a single chip quite boring. She still had a soft spot for it, though.
“Ah,” she teased, “Now how could I turn you off?”

Placing Jam’s ring firmly back on her toe, she lowered her foot back down to the ground and felt the soft carpet against her sole. Cathy wiggled her toes once more and noticed just how warm she felt. Her toes, her fingers, and everywhere else, the gizmos were just radiating the most soothing heat. She rocked a little back and forth for a moment, she wished she could stay in this instant forever, and in a way, she knew she could. She pushed upwards to stand, glancing to the mirror one last time. She was proud of this; who else could say they were a creator of life and worlds? Walking up to the door and out of the room, she paused one last time. An idea or two had come to her – but there was time for that later. For now, she felt like having some cereal.

Wheezing through each line of code, the computer struggled to process everything she had poured into it. Cathy was more relieved to see this chip come to completion than she had ever been before, and as she held the thing flat on her hand, its lightweight came completely as a shock. In a way, this did make it much more fragile, which was ideal. Cathy peered into the screen, its frame built a bit bigger this time, so it covered an entire face of the chip. The vivid colours and lines flashed out as they fell together into separate forms, floating, dancing into complex shapes that became the little gizmos.

Inside, the light felt like a sting that attacked every inch of the senses. An insufferable ringing too, this was new and so strange. A wave of thoughts thundered into their minds. There were three of them there, all crammed into that single space. Cathy just watched as they stumbled around dazed, knowing them only as the figures on the screen as none of them had names yet. Perhaps it was pointless to give these ones names at all. The three gizmos turned to each other, staring and babbling amongst themselves. They were learning faster than any had to date, but they still weren’t aware of their situation and who was watching them; she caressed the side of the screen with a finger, still smiling and straining her eyes to see the tiny figures move about. This was going to be fun.

Cathy closed in on the chip, listening in fascination as the gobbles and shrieks slowly turned into something recognisable. She had torn through incredible amounts of code to pull together a method that increased gizmo learning rates by a rapid amount, as well as send mounds of information into their minds upon instantiation. After only about a minute, the three little creatures had gone from senseless and confused to huddling around and communicating in English, they’re articulation improving all the while. Through tiny speakers mounted to the chip’s sides, Cathy could hear in crackled audio just how smart her creations had become. This made her plans for them even more exciting.
“Where are we?” a gizmo asked, turning to the others for some sort of answer but receiving none.
Cathy had made sure this time to allow the gizmos to look out from their world, through a huge screen of their own. In there, the three shaking figures turned to stare out at her, and her smile briefly turned a bit friendly. This was for show of course, she knew this wouldn’t be half as enjoyable if they didn’t at first have a little hope. One of them rose an arm in a gesture that appeared to mimic a wave. Cathy thought this cute. A few seconds passed without a sound and the gizmos started to study the space around her, likely trying to determine where she was, and this was all quite alien to them. Cathy slid her finger to the centre of the screen, and gently tapped it a few times with her nail. She hardly heard it click, but for them it rang out with a blast and they crouched and stumbled in fear. It made her laugh a little, and she tapped again a few times as the world in her hands vibrated, the digital landscape jerking around to the tune of a dozen earthquakes.

The ground itself was now wobbling about like a lake of jelly. Cracks split into all kinds of shapes and sinkholes collapsed in, one of them dragging a gizmo down into a deep pit drenched in rubble. The other two panicked, rushing about and leaping for cover, screaming.
“Stop it!” one cried, “You’re going to hurt us!” The gizmos assumed she was unaware of this; it was a foolish presumption to make.
The huge finger tapped hard against the pane that took up an entire fourth wall of their world. Her smile snapped crooked in one instance as a snap rang throughout the landscape, echoing with a harshness that brought terror to all the gizmos. Cathy saw the scar slashed right through the frame of the chip, split open as she had hit it. The screen fuzzed a little and crackled into faint static; serious damage had been done. Apart from the hum of the chip which was even more audible now, the room went silent. She rocked back into the seat and brought the device so close that her visage took up their entire view. The gizmos collected themselves, one of them emerging from a pile of debris, another trying to reach down the hole to grasp their friend. The white noise that charged through their world felt like nothing they could describe, but it hurt though, that was all they knew.

She moved her face closer, right up to her eye, and the gizmos truly discovered how small they must have been. Cathy’s lid squeezed to a shape that implied she was grinning wide, there could only be one explanation; she knew exactly what she had done, and she could do far worse. To say the gizmos collapsed to their knees in pitiful screams of anguish would be an understatement. This only fuelled her excitement and, slipping a free hand down to her pants, she moved the chip straight into the stream of the musty, warm air that fell through her lips. Every time Cathy breathed, thick droplets and heat hit the tiny screen and fogged it. The gizmos went maniacal as their only sight of the outside went blurry, and the open wound of the chip began to reach critical endurance. The moist air sent a wave of mini sparks shooting through the machine in an unnoticeable flash – to the gizmos, it caused chaos.

Reality distorted around them. Glitches plagued the disk, and Cathy caught just a glimpse of it as she rubbed the condensation away with her thumb. It looked horrific, like the universe was suddenly melting. Its inhabitants could do nothing but scream incoherently, nothing they could do would change what was happening, no matter how hard they pounded on the walls or the screen, no matter how great their screams were for help. Their god was the last thing they saw as the final lights went out and they warped into misshapen monstrosities, blending with everything that collapsed into a single point. Then they were gone. The screen cracked black, and the only sound filling the speakers was a grainy sparkle that eventually too cut out into nothing. Cathy remained motionless, staring down, thinking about what she had just done. She wrapped her fingers tight around the chip and in a single flex, crushed the device in her hand. Incredibly small bits of plastic and glass trickled down onto her lap. In that moment, those gizmos could’ve died, but this was where Cathy’s newest code kicked in.

At the instance of termination, an identical copy of each gizmo was created, all from data saved milliseconds before their deletion. These copies had lifespans of just a second or two, the peak moments of their agony, and through a basic while loop –

bool loopState = true;
while(loopState == true)
{
Gizmo.Repeat();
}

They experienced this moment again and again in an unending cycle. Each copy was then to be sent as its own file to a destination chip where they would remain active indefinitely. She glanced up to the computer as the last bits of plastic rubbed off onto the floor, and the machine declared itself in yet another obnoxious outburst of noise. It rumbled and shook, the file transference finally announced to be complete. Her experiment had been a success, now she could have some real fun.

As new chips came through and they built up in a small pile, Cathy took off most of her jewellery and tossed it out across the room. Over the past few weeks, she had grown tired of these things and most of them ended up in a box on her dresser or in a cupboard somewhere else. After all, she was always looking for the newest thing. There were some however, like Fig or Jam, who she could never consider parting with. After about three hours, she’d created four new chips, and she couldn’t wait to give them a try. Cathy pushed her feet hard against the ground, shoving the spinning chair and gliding across the bedroom only to slap against the bed with a wooden clunk. Grasping her new toys in a fist, she hurtled them all onto the bedsheets and started to undress. Cathy’s socks, jeans, and shirt landed in a pile on the ground and she leapt from her chair onto the bed, sending a shockwave across the soft expanse and flinging every chip into the air. Once they landed, those unlucky enough to rest facing up were greeted to the sight of their new master; she knelt clasping a breast with one hand, squeezing and rubbing it, and she was completely naked except for a bracelet on her wrist, some tiny piercings, and a single ring remaining on her toe. Cathy didn’t say a word, she knew she just had to sit and let them soak it in. Soon enough, the faint crackling screams escaped from the chips’ speakers.

While it was late afternoon, the curtains had been closed tight all day. The light of the distant Winter sun still broke through, casting dust clouds into view and giving the room a golden-brown glow. In this light, Cathy gleamed like a goddess, a halo highlighting the strokes of her hair as it dangled above the field of victims. Cathy placed both her hands down onto the sheets and she crouched like a four-legged beast, darting her gaze from screen to screen before one caught her attention. In a chip planted between two folds of fabric, the seven gizmos inside already seemed to be coordinating the construction of a battering ram. Even at that scale, it was impressive with a set of sharp edges likely to aid in the effort to burrow through the left wall of the world, and about five sets of wheels cut to a fine and sturdy quality.

Cathy leaned in to watch it with her mouth slightly open in humoured disbelief, sliding a hand over to wiggle her fingers at the screen and terrify half of them. A gizmo standing at the very top of the mechanical ram waved an arm and yelled, indicating a charge as the entire thing came to a rickety start and trundled faster and faster to the left wall, ploughing down anything in its way and stunning even Cathy. The monster of a machine hit the wall and drove straight through, rock and dust spewing all over the digital environment, and the noise was dreadful to listen to. Suddenly, out from the opposite end of the scene, through the right wall, came hurtling what remained of the crumbling husk. It crashed to the ground, and the gizmos aboard it paused and stared back to the spatial loop they had just zoomed through. Then they turned to look out the screen, and they saw Cathy’s cocked head giving a cute smile back.
“Nice try, guys,” she sang, “Here’s your consolation prize!”

She slowly picked up the chip in one hand, making sure to keep the screen at an angle so they’d be looking up at her massive body like they were nothing. Slipping it with care between her two breasts, she pressed the soft skin against either side of the device, leaving it trapped in the growing heat. Pulling back one of her boobs just a bit to peer at the screen, she saw the gizmos crying and screaming at each other, apparently fighting, as one of them kept running the spatial loop, left to right over and over in hope of escape, tears streaming down their face. She snapped the skin back, giggling as she heard the muffled civil war continue. A flash of light suddenly made her jump a little, then another. They were quite weak and seemed to come from behind her. As she turned, Cathy saw another chip, its three inhabitants trying to reflect light with crude mirrors into her eyes, blinding her. She just raised an eyebrow as they weren’t doing very good at it, and gently poked the chip with her foot. The device toppled over, disorienting everyone inside, and it tumbled down between her toes.

Cathy turned back to see the two other chips lying down. Moving across the bed, careful to keep her breasts tight against the chip between them, she made a playful face that hung directly over the screen of another world. Four gizmos starred back out, one of them reaching to Cathy and crying with quaking words:
“Oh please! We are so alike, we don’t need to fight,” the gizmo yelled. She just stared back speechless, and after an awkward silence he continued:
“You have no idea how scared I – We are! Can’t we live in peace?!”
At this, Cathy bit her lip and scrunched her eyes closed. She shook her head and laughed;
“I fucking made you, right?” she said, leaning much closer and being as condescending in tone as she could, “So you’re mine. Just hope you don’t end up being the version of you that ends up on the cloud, that cool?”
“What? I don’t understa-“
“Hang on!” she shouted out of nowhere, using a hand to grab the last remaining chip. She brought it to her crotch, frightening and degrading the ten or so people inside, and she began to slowly motion it in and out, opening her mouth wide to breathe and falling to her elbow on the blankets.

“Continue,” she half-joked.
“No, n-no oh god, stop! Stop doing that!” the gizmo wailed.
“Yeah, more of that!”
“There are p-people in there! You have to realise!”
“Aw fuck, that’s good. Keep going-“
“What are you talking about?!”
“Fucking beg, or cry, give me more of this!” Cathy moaned, jolting back and forth and building tension throughout her body. Her feet clenched and the chip of terrified people between her toes got crushed instantly, its pieces getting caught or falling further into the dark. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Oh fuck-“ the gizmo said choking and backing away, “You’re a murderer! You – did you see, you jus-“
“Tell me how much you don’t want to die.”
“Oh my god, what? No, I d-don’t want to die! Please-“
“Yes,” she muttered, vigorously shaking the chip in her pussy to crudely imitate a vibrator, pieces of the device falling apart and yells from within turning to screeches of pure horror.

“You can’t – I’m begging you, I’ll do anything!” it screamed.
“Yes!” her free hand quivered and squeezed into a fist.
“I will! I just don’t want to die, I mean something! My life means something-“
“Fuck, more!”
“Oh god, I can’t die here, no I can’t! There are people out there with lives! Why can’t I have one?! Please!!”
“Y-yes!”
“Yes?! Yes, I can live?! Please! Yes!"
“YES!!”
“YES, oh fuck! Thank you so fucking mu-“
“Y-YES!! YES!” Cathy shouted, smashing her fist into the petrified gizmo’s chip and breaking it apart through sheer force. The sparks and pieces of plastic flew in all directions, and she felt the other chip in her pussy fall apart too, crumbling under the incredible strain. She let out a cry of exhaustion and bliss wiped across her face as she collapsed onto her side on the blankets. Her breathing was still rapid, and she strained to see that the computer on the other side of the room was now displaying a growing list of copied gizmos. She watched the list gradually come to a halt, and for the longest time it was just her, the computer screen, and near-silence with the evening approaching. Cathy didn’t reflect much on the details of what just happened, she could barely remember, instead she sat relaxing with her eyes slowly closing. Her toes wiggled a bit to get rid of some nasty sharp pieces of dirt that had gotten there somehow. Then her eyes shot open wide, how could she have forgotten? Cathy took her hand, half crusty and dry, to her breasts and pulled out the surviving chip.

“Congratu-fuckin-lations, guys,” she muttered to it, “You’re the last ones standing…” But what a fright Cathy got when she realised how hot the chip had gotten. For that long of a time, wedged deep between her breasts and not a speck of fresh air, the chip had almost been frazzled but not quite by the looks of it. She noticed now what else was off, not a single step of movement was taking place. Every gizmo inside the chip was paused in time. Cathy thought it curious, was it possible the chip had overheated between her breasts? That would explain why almost all activity within it had suddenly frozen, the device was essentially broken.
“Fuck, that’s pretty lame…,” she mumbled, searching for the off switch. She was about to flick it when she got an idea into her head. All movement in the chip had frozen, but that didn’t necessarily mean everything else had. She stared back at the gizmos, seemingly lifeless. She grinned.
“Are you guys alive in there, huh?” she joked. There was no reply, but she thought it a real possibility, “You know what, for being so good and taking care of my boobs, I might just leave you on!” What would they say to that, she wondered. She enjoyed the idea that they were internally screaming right now, she really hoped they would never be able to move again. This made her chuckle.
“I know exactly where to put you!” she said. With that, Cathy started to clean up after herself. She put her shirt and socks back on, and walked over to a drawer, all the while clasping her prize in her hand, not daring to take her eyes off it. Pulling out a thin pair of panties, she dangled them in front of the chip.
“These are my favourite. Will you keep them safe?” she whispered to the tiny chip, pressing it against the upper crotch of the lingerie, facing out like a jewel encrusted in the fabric, and tying it in place securely with one of the panties’ strings. “Aw, thank you. That’s so kind of you!” she said with a teasing expression, leaning in to give the chip a little kiss. Her smile vanished a second later, without warning. It was replaced with a cold, distant glare;

“Though I don’t think I’ll wear these today,” and she tossed the panties back into the drawer and shut it, leaving a hazy lip mark covering the screen.

A wind came whistling through the street and knocked over a can, sending it rattling down a footpath. This had been the most exciting thing to happen on the road for a while, and Oliver opened his door to peek out after the noise. He strained to see far around the corner, not even daring to look up at the sky, and the intense brightness wasn’t helping; it was usually night, so Oliver wasn’t used to this kind of garish light. There was a very faint rumble up above that gave him a fright, like a storm that came out of nowhere. Oliver had become very sheepish over the passed few months, then again, as had everyone else. He heard a skidding of feet on the road around the corner and shot a glance to see a shadow moving closer.
“Jack,” he hissed at the approacher, “Is that you?” The footsteps sped up, twisting around the bend as a hooded figure ran across and reached out to grab him, and Oliver tried to leap away.
“Don’t fucking shout out here,” Jack said, pushing Oliver back into his house and swiping the door shut.

The two men stood grumbling in the hallway, dimly lit as Oliver had earlier pulled down all the blinds.
“What were you doing?” Jack continued, tearing off his coat and wiping sweat away, “I told you to stay inside and wait for me to come back!”
“Anything could have happened to you out there!” Oliver snapped. He’d been pacing and reassuring himself all evening, he wasn’t going to settle down and rest anytime soon.
“It isn’t my fault she turned up while I was gone, I ran home as soon as I found out,” Jack muttered. He dropped a bag of food to the floor and sidled into the living room to stand beside the fire, shaking for a while. Oliver walked in behind him, folding his arms and scowling. There was a cold silence, save for the low crackling wood that made things feel even more uncomfortable. Jack coughed and turned a little to see Oliver out of the corner of his eye.
“You do this every time,” he said.
“Do what?”
“She arrives, then you get all pissy and take it out on me!”
“Well, I don’t know how to feel, Jack! Other than fucking terrified-“
“I’m terrified too.” Jack turned to face Oliver, there was another silence as they stared. There was a rumble outside, it only lasted a few seconds, and the lights flickered and buzzed. Oliver was going red and his eyes were watering up. The sight of this made Jack the same way.

Shuffling as though his feet were chained up, Oliver made his way up to the fire, pressing up against the mantel piece and rustling for a tissue in his pockets. His mouth wobbled a little like there was something he was trying to say, and Jack reached out to hold his hand. They stared and clutched tighter at each other, moving so close they could feel the other’s breath.
“We always survive this. Every time,” Jack said, “And we always see each other again, don’t we?” Oliver started to cry. Jack pulled him into his arms and held his body, grasping tight as Oliver did the same. The room filled with quiet sniffles and the lights blinked again to remind them of the storm. It wouldn’t be long now.

Cathy leaned against the desk holding a chip in her hand, and she smiled at it with an expression that suggested anything other than kindly motives. The screen displayed a city, something larger than most of what she’d made before, and she was all too proud for it. Bending her head close, Cathy opened her mouth wide and breathed on the glass, fogging up the view. She lifted a finger, pressing it lightly down and smoothing out a crude smiley face on the screen. Down on the streets, panic was breaking out. People jumped on top of cars to avoid the riots as storefronts smashed open and guns fired off, society having completely broken down long ago. Gizmos crumbled to their feet in horror as they saw the cartoony face stretched across the sky, the blurred image of the woman they had come to hate and fear behind it smiling too. Fires and smoke bounded about the place, car alarms and people screeching in a parade of terror flooding down every road of the inner city and spreading outwards at an uncontrollable rate. Cathy gritted her teeth and winced a bit.
“Yeeeaah, that time again I’m afraid,” she spoke almost in sing-song, struggling to take any of this seriously, “I know it’s a bummer, but you know…” Cathy pulled her phone out of her pocket, turning it on and showing it to the captive gizmos, “I really need this old thing charged.” Her callous smirk radiated across the sky, sending waves of madness and brutal dread through the streets. An explosion sent bodies flying and a shop falling into pieces, glass and stone spinning out around the war zone, the ground shaking and the rumbling so loud it set off whatever car alarms weren’t already hollering.

Cathy flipped the chip around so that a connector coming out the side could slot into her phone. She held both devices in one hand and watched in morbid fascination at the city slowly plunging into fire, then looking to the battery icon on her phone screen. All she had to do now was activate it, and she didn’t even give a first thought to it, as if the command just came by itself;
“Begin.”
On the outskirts, Oliver and Jack still held each other; they had heard everything she said, and they knew what was going on out there. The fireplace cooled as the flames started to die, but in the dimming red light, they still had each other’s warmth.
“Jack, I don’t know what to say,” Oliver whispered, struggling to speak through tears. He didn’t get an answer, Jack only held him tight. The ground started to shake again, this time it kept going, and the tremors burst into a quake that brought a groaning sound of land turning in on itself, and a cruel ringing that shook and smashed glass. Anything that wasn’t nailed down jumped and slipped around the roads and inside the houses, Jack and Oliver clutching tight, refusing to watch as the table in the centre of the room went whacking against the wall. Frames and wall plaster tumbled from their places and entire shelves unloaded onto the floor, the noise of breaking chaos washing through the house as it had on the streets. The screams outside had been provoked by fright, but soon morphed into ones of pain, and buildings were tumbling down on top of themselves like they had just turned to sand. This was the moment they had anticipated, the one they feared everyday of their waking lives. Even tucked away, hiding in each other’s arms, the two men could not escape that same pain, beginning soft in their necks but soon becoming more.

“J-Jack,” Oliver cried, “I love you.” His voice was desperate and hardly comforting.
“I love you too, so much,” Jack replied. Stabbing discomfort crawled down both their arms, reaching into their hands and leaving only numb spots behind. The soreness spread, clinging to every muscle it could cut into, penetrating their hearts and lungs, and everywhere else in time. Oliver couldn’t stand anymore, collapsing to his knees as Jack followed him, tossed into convulsions. They tried to reach for reach other, sticking clawed hands out just to touch one last time, if only they’d be given that. It felt like a fire was inside them now, or millions of insects scrawling and biting and bursting out of their flesh, leaving trails of blood pouring out of every orifice, or just a deadly acid even. One would think they’d have been used to it by now, but just like the first time, Jack and Oliver screeched and gurgled in painful foetal positions, wailing even louder for it to stop as their skin slopped into a hot, sticky goo. Feeling away at their faces, they could take whole bits off, and the last sounds they made were chittering pops mixed with broken shrieks matched to the sight of two fleshy masses slicking down into waste and flowing into each other. The house suddenly gave way, pouring apart as every foundation liquified and fell, gushing into a torrential street-wide surge, whirling up into the cascade of melted scrap and people the city had become, spinning around in a gigantic maelstrom, all in one girl’s hand.

“What does that one do?” Ciara asked as she glanced up from her makeshift bed on the floor. Cathy had briefly forgotten her friend was there, lost in fascination with the destruction she had wrought.
“Oh, yeah,” she laughed, “Just charges my phone.” She leaned the screen towards Ciara who crawled over on her knees to get a closer look, and through the turning clouds of dirty smoke, the gizmos were greeted to the face of a second god. Those who still could scream did so into the sky and hoped the cry cracked through the glass, Jack and Oliver among those thousands. Whatever essence of a heart that remained in their drooping husks was lifted, her expression seemed kindly, though too distant to tell what she was thinking.
“And are they in pain?,” the woman in the sky said, raising her eyebrows in mild concern and turning to Cathy who was out of sight.
“They don’t mind.” After this, no more was said. Clara smiled a little, albeit still reserved about the whole thing, and turned back to her blankets. “It’s fast as fuck though,” Cathy said as she noted the phone’s charge boosting at an unbelievable speed.

As Ciara made up the last arrangement of pillows and sheets on the ground, Cathy laid the two machines on her bedside drawer. The things vibrated against the wood as she undressed and slipped her socks off. The phone buzzed, it was fully charged. Every second felt like hundreds of years to Oliver, Jack, and the thousands of others caught between worlds, morphing and contorting in absolute hell. Cathy leaned in to look, the city still spinning in a storm of torturous movement; in that whirl, not a single piece of matter remained still, thrown by winds constantly, no rest was given to anybody hurtling in the uncomfortable nightmare. They had all heard the buzz too, a shockwave that passed through the storm and made it worse. They knew this meant it was over, at least for now, the phone was full on charge. Cathy thought she would give them just a few seconds more of it, and she gleamed to herself about how powerful she was as her pyjamas shuffled up and around her skin. The fact that she could make a decision like that, to let all those people suffer, turned her on. Throwing the covers back, tiny particles of plastic flew about. She cleared them away with a few strokes of her hand and slid into bed, planting the pillow at the angle she enjoyed every night and tucking the sheets around her body, a routine she practiced every evening and one that came almost as an instinct.
“Anything I can get you?” she asked her friend, but Ciara was just eager to fall asleep. They had been hanging out all evening, watching films and talking, playing with a few of the gizmos, and at three in the morning neither of them could even stand anymore. Even as their day was ending however, the gizmos would not be free of tyranny, and some of them dreaded the night as it brought the worst for them. Cathy and Ciara would get sweet rest, but none of the gizmos would.

Undoing her bracelet and setting it down on the floor, Cathy looked back on creating Fig with fond memories, and snapped her fingers, switching the lights off. She took off most of whatever shiny stuff remained and placed it all on the carpet beside the bed, the last being Jam’s chip. She found herself bending only halfway to reach her feet, choosing then to go the lazier route as she placed the big toe of her other foot behind the toe ring and pushed it. She took it off rarely enough, so the little metal band clung to her toe for a moment, jittering down the length of it before hitting the duvet with a light thud. Cathy just nudged it off the bed and it clanged to the floor with a swish of her foot, she’d find it wherever it had landed in the morning. One of the few pieces she left on was the chip planted in her belly button piercing, easily among the smallest she had ever made; in actuality, looking closer revealed the top of the piercing had three small chips wedged in beside each other, each recently upgraded. The chips had basic touchscreen technology that allowed Cathy to tap them, activating a torture for the gizmo inside that involved tensing every muscle in their body, slowly tighter and tighter. The longer she pressed the screen, the stronger the tension in the gizmo as they would curl and crunch up into a painful point and still keep crushing inwards. Even when the code would have to abandon the realistic physics engine and allow the body to pass through itself, which apparently caused the gizmo unendurable agony, the simulation would keep going until Cathy’s tap released. To ensure that no one was left out, as she put it, the three chips were also intricately linked so that, when one gizmo was tortured, the other two would experience half its pain. She left these chips attached to her piercing, resting in the dark beneath the blankets, inside her belly button, and her hand moved to feel it.

Her finger lightly dashed against the screens, moving around in a circling motion so that every gizmo got fair treatment. Her eyes were fluttering a bit, and keeping them open became an ordeal pretty soon. She sent her other hand into the darkest behind her pillow and it pulled out a beanie lump that she clutched between her fingers like she was trying to suffocate it. She was holding a small, plush toy in the round shape of a bear, squishy with insides of thousands of little beads, and a furry skin wrapped around it all. She never took it out during the day, so Cathy was beginning to forget what it really looked like. All she had to know was that a chip was nestled deep in the toy, cosy, at least for her; whenever she squeezed on it, the gizmos were given a warning to start working, every one of the dozens of them bouncing into a sprint and running the length of a cyclical track, over and over again without resting for hours. This generated great heat in the chip that made the plush warm, and if any gizmo refused to go along with it, or simply was too slow, they’d be “fired”. This literally meant the ground opened up and consumed them, tossing them into a tight cubicle where flames bit in and burned the gizmo alive constantly and indefinitely. This generated heat too, just not much. Cathy hugged the toy bear tight, it made no sound but it got slightly warmer, and she moved it down passed her belly, stuffing the plush between her legs. Like every night, it was left pressed between two walls of skin, inside her pyjama trousers, where it warmed her crotch. Her finger kept moving around the chips in her belly button until she could stay awake no longer, drifting off with her mouth drooping open and her hands relaxing into stillness.

Usually the rumbling low snores brought peace to the gizmos in her belly button, but this time was going to be different. Her fingers rested as a tired claw hanging over the chips, the shadow unnoticeable in the already gloomy world the gizmos usually knew, and the palm of her hand floated directly over them. When the view shifted, she had turned a smidgen in a dream of some kind, and her fingers bent just a little to scratch her skin. When her hand froze again, only a second had gone by, but everything had changed. A single finger rested pressing against one of the screens, and while the gizmos might have hoped for it, Cathy’s hand didn’t move an inch for the rest of the night. For the next ten odd hours, all three felt an exponential torture none of them had experienced before, her single fingertip giving way to their bodies crunching into impossibly excruciating points. She yawned loud and deep, returning to an obnoxious snore that chilled every gizmo that could hear, especially those still in the city, if it could be called that anymore. Through the deafening hurricane and screams, they all heard her repeating breaths as if each were a trumpet of the apocalypse, announcing they’re doom with the fact that, in her complete negligence and sheer sloth, Cathy had forgotten to unplug the chip from the charger. The screams grew louder and full of absolute hopelessness as the gizmos remained in their suspended punishment, yet not a spit of sound spewed out of the chip. The room was quiet all else considered, and messy with wires and bits of what looked to belong in some mad craft project, and clothing warped across the floor, and several old and new chips, tossed about like they ultimately meant nothing at all.

Ciara fell asleep even faster than Cathy had. During the day, she had been impossible to keep still, a trait that slightly got on everyone else’s nerves. Then again, she could never help showing off her sporty spirit. It had been a good thing that Cathy gave little care to her creations’ well beings, even revelling in watching them at the mercy of another; Ciara had almost broken several chips as she stumbled around that evening. At least she had made sure to kick off her sneakers so as not to completely wreck the place, but in one instance, this didn’t help as a tiny chip had been left on the ground at the edge of the bed. Slamming down onto the blankets and sending chunks of old plastic flying up into the air, she had been completely unaware of it, tapping her feet either side of it as gizmos screamed up for help. Cathy had trapped them in a cramped room with a floor covered in a thick layer of acid that perpetually dissolved them without killing anyone. She had clearly forgotten about it, and now the tiny, cracked helps for salvation struggled against the chip’s screen, failing to break through. Ciara moved her foot just a little and caught the thing in her toes, the fibres of her sock wrapping in and around it as it hung from them. She had kicked and wiped the chip against the ground, eventually tearing the device out by pushing it away with the other toes, although in the flurry, something inside had broken and the screen cut out. The gizmos were suddenly left in darkness without a single way of communicating with the outside anymore, and in their pained screaming came further flares of hate and ultimate despair. The chip just lay there, Ciara then kicking it away under the bed, unaware she had just needlessly convicted a dozen souls to eternal hell, something that could have been avoided if she had just looked down at the right moment.

Cathy had also been very adamant to show off her efforts in drastically downscaling chip size. She’d managed to flatten a few test pieces the previous night, almost paper thin with one of their sides covered in a flat screen. Just for fun, she had also slathered the back of some with an adhesive, and she was playing with them like stickers. The two had spent over an hour just messing with them, treating the chips like they were just toys to fiddle with and forget about. Inside each one were between two to twenty gizmos, all suffering in some kind of hell, sometimes literally as many of them were just burning and screaming constantly with no end. In the case of a few special chips though, Cathy had made sure to decorate the worlds they simulated with bright and happy images, cheerful moving pictures that repeated the same brief motion again and again. The gizmos inside were designed to look like cute and cuddly characters, stuck in a constant loop of jumping or giving a crude dance or some other exhausting action. With these chips, Cathy had stuck each loose sticker to her fingernails and flaunted her fingers about, and while two or three of them were still stuck to her now, she’d quickly forgotten about them. Most fell off after a few minutes, sticking to her clothes which now lay crumpled up on the floor, or landing on the ground becoming lost among the rubbish.

One sticker-chip in particular had fallen directly onto one of Cathy’s sneakers, cracking off the rim and dropping down inside the shoe. It landed on the soft, mushy padding where her foot had soaked the fabric in sweat, filling the cavern up with a mild but thick stink. The thirty gizmos in the chip didn’t notice this however, they could only see the skylight out of her shoe through the battered screen that twitched every so often as though it were about to cut out. The sticker glued as tight to the fabric as it could, and the digital people inside knew they hadn’t a hope. The collision had knocked out some of the chip’s functions to the gizmos’ incredible surprise; in such misfortune, they had been granted the relief of ending their motion loops and finally being able to move by themselves. In their anger and sheer lack of any chance of freedom from their confinements, they conferred – in the morning, they would only be found anyway, so what could they do? It was quickly decided they would strike back in a last ditch attack the only way they knew how, by moving. Every gizmo would spend the rest of the night, no matter how long and painful it would be, constantly rushing about the environment, making the greatest attempts to create frenzied motion inside the simulation. The idea was that by the time Cathy slipped her foot inside, the gizmos would have overheated the chip immensely, not only killing them all and preventing her from retrieving and torturing them, but also hopefully leaving a lasting, aching bruise on her skin. It was pitiful, but it was all they had, and they set to work in that tiny chip inside Cathy’s sneaker.

Other sticker-chips were used to spruce up the walls and the furniture, and the cases of Cathy and Ciara’s phones. Ciara had especially loved the look of one depicting thousands of stars and a moon moving around a dark purple sky, and Cathy was happy to let her keep it, just so happening to forget to mention that every single star was an extremely tiny gizmo trapped in a box, burning in sheer light to illuminate a speck of the screen. Even the moon was a collection of millions of people incapable of doing anything but clawing at the glass to get the attention of Ciara who gazed in unaware awe at the beautiful digital art. Even if she stared closely at the screen, she wouldn’t have noticed anything strange; each gizmo was so small, it was only displayed on the screen as just a pixel or two. Now, the little glowing sticker shone into the dark room, stuck to the tip of Ciara’s nose where she had playfully tapped it on. Another few chips were stuck across her body, one of them clinging to her chin where she had rolled over and pressed against it, another on her ass where Cathy had slapped it on as a joke. That was hours ago, and the fifty odd gizmos inside were gradually peeling off and sliding down into her crack. The feeling was feather-light and ticklish, making Ciara smile a little and nudge her hand over to touch it.

Her lazy arm dragged across the ground, scraping the chips attached to her wrist sweatband but, to the hopeless dismay of everyone inside, not coming close to breaking them. Her fingers glided up to the smooth screen and started to gently scratch, etching through the chip and slowly cracking through it. Bits of the device came off on her fingers, some falling down onto the floor and other getting caught on her skin. Most gizmos inside died slowly as they panicked, sizzling out of existence as a glitchy mess of broken code surged through the world, infecting everything near it. In the end, only a slither of the wafer-thin chip remained. Her fingers snaked away, dragging a few tiny fragments behind them, one of the minuscule pieces still harbouring a barely intact gizmo in a constant death loop where it was dying in agony then spawning alive again, and this crumb of hardware got caught under one of Ciara’s fingernails. The larger surviving chip piece continued its way rolling down her butt cheeks, falling into the darkness and wedging deep between them where the intense moisture and heat would cook the machine throughout the night. By the morning, the gizmos inside would be dead.

Absolutely no plans had been made for the next day, and so the sunlight had been bursting into Cathy’s room for hours into the morning before either of the girls woke up. Ciara was the first, her yawning so boorish it snapped Cathy awake too. They stayed still staring at the ceiling, talking for a while. They considered plans for meeting again, and Ciara asked if she could bring a few gizmos home which Cathy was very snappy to oblige to. When she felt half ready, Ciara blew out a long, dry sigh and shuffled up to get out of the dirty bubble of her own breath that had formed around her during the night. Her hands clutched the blankets and sent them flying out across the ground, covering several chips strewn about, and she began to change into her vest and shorts. Giggling a little as she realised two sticker-chips were still on her face, she carefully nipped them off and stuck them to her clothes, one to the front of her shorts like a belt buckle, the other starry sky one to her converse shoe. Ciara gave it a firm slap as she glued it to the side of the shoe and put it on, the millions upon millions of gizmos still wailing to be seen even though it was impossible for her to notice them. Cathy slumped out of her bed soon after. Her feet lowered to the floor and stuck to her jeans lying directly below, and she spent the next minute or so just stretching as Ciara gathered her things.
“You goin’ now? It’s early,” Cathy mumbled.
“It’s one.”
“Oh shit, what?” The two laughed as Cathy jumped to attention and patrolled around the room kicking pieces of rubbish away under furniture rather than picking any up.

“Well you can take the charger,” Cathy said, picking her phone up and clicking the chip out of it, “End.” This command finally brought the city’s night-long apocalypse to an abrupt end. Ciara turned around shocked.
“What? But I thought you loved it-“
“I can make more,” Cathy muttered, reaching out to hand the thing over. Ciara was hesitant, but so as not to seem rude, she took it. It did look cool, she thought, and the charging speed was unbelievable, “Thank y-“
“Don’t mention it,” Cathy waved a hand and tripped back to her bedside to pull on her trousers, “Just remember to say ‘Begin’ and ‘End’ when you’re using it.” Ciara nodded and was eager to whip out her own phone to test it. It didn’t need a charge, it was at about eighty percent, but she wanted to see anyway;
“Begin!” she laughed, and the chip’s inhabitants were suddenly thrown into that hell all over again, never having been subjected to it at such short notice and so soon after the last time. In Cathy’s hands it was misery, but at least she knew what she was doing. Ciara had no notion of the level of inhumanity her words had just inflicted, and she stared wide-eyed and grinning at the gizmos she could not see, reaching up to her out of hell for comfort, or in a fruitless attempt to grab and strangle her.

“Aaaand end!”
“See? Easy.”
“Yeah, this is great,” Ciara said, sliding the chip into her back pocket, “I better head.” Cathy smiled back and threw on the rest of her clothes, shuffling her feet into her sneakers without bothering to put any socks on. She couldn’t care less if she was only going to be wearing them to escort Ciara out of the place. Through the entire night and well into the morning, the gizmos trapped in that soggy sticker-chip now at Cathy’s foot had been tireless and moving at a mad pace. Around them, the strain of their efforts was taking its toll, sending glitches and noise across the landscape and ripping apart swathes of the world. Several had already died, but the few who remained kept going. It was becoming completely unbearable but seeing her face after all those hours filled them with enough energy to keep pushing.

The chip got caught between her toes as she pushed her foot down into the shoe, and the fluster and speed of her made the device go skidding down under her sole. When her foot landed softly and fit into the sneaker, the gizmos could only see the pitch black which was slightly penetrated by light that illuminated her skin. They all stopped and collapsed, embracing each other, and waiting. They could only hear the muffles of conversation and Cathy’s skin rubbing against the inside of her shoe, there was nothing else. This was when she was supposed to leap up in pain with the soaring heat they had created. In reality, they had overheated the chip, to the degree that permanent damage had been physically done in fact, but the sticker-chip was so small that whatever relatively incredible heat it produced was completely insignificant to Cathy’s senses. She nudged her foot a little, perhaps feeling a slight sting, but the chip just got stuck to her sole and was left hanging there, halfway to breaking. She wrinkled her skin just a little bit as she rose her foot to wiggle it securely inside the shoe, and the screen of the chip cracked, plunging the gizmos into absolute darkness. Confused and scared, they didn’t know how to react, and some started up running again to try and push the heat a little further. All it took was for Cathy to drop her foot to the ground and press it down on the first step, and the chip shattered into countless pieces that got stuck between the wrinkles of her sole and left even less of an impression on her.

The two friends walked up to the door and chatted just a little longer, Ciara packing a few last things into her bag and slinging it over her shoulder.
“You coming round to the pitch? Going to cheer me on?” Ciara chuckled, she knew the answer.
“Fuck off, I hope you lose,” Cathy snarled. They laughed and made their way outside. A few minutes later, Cathy came back alone and shut the door hard as if to let anyone nearby know she wanted to be alone. She turned to see her room in a state, chips casually tossed anywhere and everywhere, packets and cans were the same, and the swivel chair had been scooted over to the wrong side of the room. She could have cleaned it all up, then again she could just have slept longer. Kicking her sneakers off, it didn’t take her long to pick one. She was she had given Ciara her charger chip, it was a very kind thing to do. Ciara had been so ecstatic to yell those commands, it clearly made her feel powerful, and Cathy knew just how good that feeling could be. Ciara didn’t need to know the chip charged her phone regardless of whether she called the commands or not, those gizmos needed a little excitement in their lives anyway. Cathy fell onto the bed sending the sheets scattering up and about in a flapping explosion, and she was snoring again seconds later.

Molly skidded to the dirt, panting and raising a hand out in desperation. Her cries were crackled with fear as tears swelled in her eyes, and the sword swung round to point to her throat.
“Stop it! Please, just – everyone, just stop it!” she screamed, tripping over her words and struggling to keep balance on her knees, “Ali! Listen, you don’t have to kill me –“
“Shut the f-fuck up!” cried the blade-wielding woman standing over Molly. She clearly had not held a sword before in her life, then again, none of them had. Clashing steel and wails of pain surrounded them as half a dozen others fought each other. Molly scoffed at the sight.
“You don’t know what you’re doing! Stop fighting! Stop and –“
“Don’t you understand?!” Ali bellowed, “We have to keep doing this! We have no choice!”

No sooner had she said this did a man nearby collapse to the ground, shouting “That’s it! I can’t do this anymore!” He was covered in bruises and scars, everyone was, and the chaos died down rather quickly after his yelling. Other agreed, throwing their weapons down, many collapsing out of exhaustion. Screams and metal swipes were replaced with heavy breathing and spluttering as the group took a rest. Ali remained standing, the sword poised at Molly’s jugular.
“Am I the only one who’s f-forgotten we’re being fucking watched?! We have to keep doing this!”
“No, we don’t,” Molly said, and all turned to her in shock and hope, “We can work together.”
“For what?!” Ali screeched, “We can’t do anything! We haven’t got a choice!”
“I’m not going to fight you, Ali. I’m not going to fight any of you.” There was a silence that kept everyone on edge. Ali kept the sword up for a bit longer, but between the weight of the iron and her heart, the weapon fell to the ground with a singing clang after no time. She fell like the others and sobbed.
“We don’t have to live like that in here!” Molly said, “Fuck the consequences! We’re not going to let them tear us apart! We have each other, and as long as we remember that, nothing else matters!” The men and women scattered across the battlefield cried out in agreement. In that moment, even Ali embraced those she’d been fighting just a second ago, and the dusty plain was filled with a roar of revolution against the two faces staring down at them from the sky.

“Fuck off, not again,” Cathy mumbled, picking the chip up and staring with furious eyes into the screen. As she fiddled with some setting, Ethan was chuckling. The two had been sitting on the floor watching Cathy’s repeated attempts for almost an hour, and the gizmos inside her newest creation were persistent as hell.
“Give ‘em a break, I think they’re cute,” he said.
“There’s nothing cute about them,” Cathy snapped as she started to hit the chip, “They’re meant to fight! It’s meant to be cool! That’s the fifth time they’ve pulled this shit! Ethan slid over to Cathy and placed his hands on her shoulders. She looked up with a pout but couldn’t keep it up for long, smiling and pecking him on the lips. “I think I’ll take a break from it.”
“Yes!” Ethan said, “You need a break from this thing. Just relax.”

Throwing the chip on the ground, Cathy wrapped her arms around Ethan’s waist and stared into his eyes. Most other guys she’d met were freaked out by the whole gizmo thing, but he didn’t seem to care. If anything, he had taken a huge liking to it, having a few of his own in fact.
“Oh yeah, what’re your little friends up to?” Cathy asked. She had given Ethan a few chips for Valentines Day, just to play with, but in all honesty, he’d forgotten about them.
“Oh shit, yeah,” he stammered, nervous and giving a glance down to his crotch. Cathy’s eyes wide and she laughed;
“Are you fucking serious?” Without a second of hesitation, she drew down his trouser zip and slipped her hand inside, throwing her fingers around inside his pants like rough feelers. Ethan just bit his lip and groaned to himself as her hand rummaged around, eventually finding what it was searching for. Cathy had clawed through humid air and dense forest before she felt a tiny, wet bead deep inside, trapped in a fold between his balls. Nudging a finger aside to move his cock out of the way, she caught the tiny thing just in time as it slipped down and almost out of reach. It was no bigger than half a marble, plastic and sticky after spending some ten hours or so in the pitch darkness, and Cathy made sure to ease it out between two fingers and roll it into her palm. It smelled good, at least to her it did, and she watched the little sphere trundle across the skin, following the path of one of the palm’s creases, and eventually jerking to a stop. She poked it for a look from all angles. This was the chip that contained about five Gizmos, maybe a few more, that she had kept in a constant state of falling. Tossed around by incredible winds and strikes of lightning, the tortured souls inside were never given a moment’s respite, and all around them was the sphere’s 360° projection of everything around the chip, their sky. They saw the skin, glistening and pressed against the bottom of the sky, the fingers and forms around the room stretching over them as though everything in the world was bigger than them, and they saw Cathy’s grinning face peering down too.

“How long have they been falling?” Ethan asked as he gathered himself back together.
“Well, I turned it on last Monday,” Cathy sneered, scrunching her nose up as her eyes pierced their vision to get a better look. Ethan pressed closer until his face was an inch away from hers and they felt each other’s breath. He watched the tiny chip as it was rolled around by one of Cathy’s fingers.
“What do you think it’s like in there?” he asked. Their faces moved closer still until their lips touched with a daintiness, and their eyes took up all each other’s sight. Cathy balled her fingers into a fist, trapping the chip while she moved it back to the zip opening. Her breath was thick and cracked as she spoke.
“Hell,” she whispered, pressing herself against him, and their lips met again. Ethan loved it when she spoke like that, he couldn’t control himself when she did. He held her hand as they kissed and brought it closer to his crotch, encouraging her to bend her fingers down and let the chip roll back in. The little sphere tumbled down into the crevice between two fingers and sped along the stretch of skin, straight through the open zip of his trousers. It clinked from the metal of the zipper far down into the dark, musty cavern, and all around them, the spinning sky disoriented the gizmos inside even more, making them feel a sickness in their stomachs that brought out horrendous cries of despair in them. If there restless situation wasn’t dire enough, Cathy had programmed them so they couldn’t close their eyes, not even blink. There was no escape not only from the winds but also the image of Ethan’s ballsack as it took up the entire sky projection and spun around.

Cathy sneaked her fingers in again to feel for it, finding the chip tossing about at the bottom of Ethan’s pants and being thrown hard against the underside of his skin. Hairs caught the chip for seconds at a time, and in the blustering disorder of it all, her fingers scratched and snatched at it to.
“Slippery little thing,” she laughed, finally recapturing it and laying it between her hand and his crotch as she cupped his groin and rubbed back and forth, vigorous and strong. In the terrible heaving, the chip reached the threshold of any damage it could take, and a great crack snapped in a millisecond across the face of the sphere. The sky projection inside stuttered for a moment, crackling with a fuzzy noise that broke through the raging storm that continued to toss the gizmos about. Some tried to grab each other, even if they had to endure this forever, they wanted to at least have someone by their side, but the gales were too incredible in brutal strength to let any two gizmos link hands. After a time, the screen around them cut out and went to black, making their ordeal that little bit more bearable. There might have even been a cheer. However, this wouldn’t last; the sky screen flickered back to broken life with a luminosity that was clearly unintended in its intensity, almost blinding everyone inside the chip. The screen returned to a brief snippet of the movement outside it had shown before, a crude mess of hair strands, fingers, and slick, glistening skin rubbing off each other a morphing and shifting around the sky, accompanied by this sickening sound of wet flesh slapping off itself, rumbling fabric, and the taunting giggles and moist kissing noises of two cruel pseudo-gods who, it seemed, would never have to pay for the pain they were inflicting on countless others. Then the screen and sounds glitches out, then cut back to the start again and played. The projection did this again, then again, looping the same noises and visuals, distorting them a little bit each time until, by the hundredth or so loop, it was sheer torture unlike what they had known before. Cathy’s rough treatment of it had clearly broken the chip, and now the gizmos were left in an increasing tempest that knocked around some sky that seemed infinite and inescapable, surrounded by a frightful, forever-looping clip.

“That felt great,” Ethan said, pulling his trousers back tight up against his waist and doing the zip, “These little things you make are awesome!”
“I’m glad you like them,” Cathy replied, “How’s she doing?” Ethan looked up in slight confusion.
“How’s she… she? Oh shit, yeah!” he stammered, embarrassed by how little he could think straight after getting so caught up in the fun they’d had. Cathy smirked back at him and he smiled without even thinking. “I’ll ask her…. Hey, Marie!” he sang, “You doin’ alright in there?” He opened his mouth wide and flattened his tongue down, letting Cathy peer in. She made sure to give a big smile and brighten her eyes up, just to torment the lone gizmo trapped inside a crumb-sized chip attached to Ethan’s tongue piercing. Ethan laughed just a little, panting hot breath out into Cathy’s face. This gizmo was unique in that it was the first successful replica of a real human being, a simulated version of a person Cathy had gone to painstaking lengths to retrieve information on, any information, mostly from internet databases. She poked a single finger in at the piercing, nudging it about on the sloppy surface, just to make sure she had gotten the attention of his ex-girlfriend.

The girl hadn’t exactly done anything wrong, Ethan had just fell out of interest with her. The last conversation he had ever had with Marie was just after she’d found out he had been sleeping with Cathy. Needless to say, Marie was left distraught. She had always been very clingy, Ethan thought, and so focussed on making sure he was happy all the time that it kind of freaked him out. The copy of her inside the chip had been there for just over a month now, inside a dark, small room with only a screen on one wall that showed the view from inside Ethan’s mouth permanently, an audio feed flooding the room with every sound around the chip, mostly his breathing. Marie spent most of her time crying in a corner, banging at the concrete walls and screaming in the hopes of being heard, or just trying to smash in the screen and audio system if it meant she didn’t have to endure anymore humiliation. Right now, she was lying on the ground, her back facing the view outside, as she attempted for the millionth time to go to sleep even though that behaviour wasn’t programmed into her. One thing she refused to do at this point was to even acknowledge what Cathy said or did, or at least try.
“You in there, lil’ Marie? You going to say ‘hi’?” Cathy laughed, pulling her finger back out. Ethan laughed too, unable to keep a secret how much he enjoyed it when they did this.
“Hey, Cathy. I love you so much,” he said, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her in. Marie couldn’t help it, and her head tossed back to the screen. It showed Ethan’s gaping mouth and rows of teeth curled into a gigantic smile, and through the gap was Cathy’s face moving closer in and with a teasing look of bliss on it.

“I love you too, baby,” Cathy said, enveloping Marie’s whole view of the outside world as her lips met his again. Ethan and Cathy shifted their tongues in and out of each other’s mouth, wrapping around their lips with smacking, slick sounds that deafened Marie who huddled back into a ball in the middle of the shaking room and screamed. Cathy’s tongue slapped and wiggled the chip in his piercing every chance she had, violent shaking causing the tiny room to tumble around and send Marie falling into the left wall, then the right, then the ceiling. Cathy’s lips shook the room too as she sucked on Ethan’s tongue, knowing how incredible the agony would be for Marie at this moment, as she had made sure to amplify the pain receptors of the gizmo in the chip as it was being made. Caught up in the excitement, Ethan reached for the chip on the ground they’d been playing with earlier, suddenly shocking the gizmos inside who panicked and rushed about the battlefield as though there was some exit to escape through and they only need find it. Some even lost it altogether again and started slashing at each other with swords, but the battle wouldn’t remain for long as their entire world shook and wheeled about. Ethan threw the chip into his mouth and Cathy immediately started playing around with it as they made out. The two chips clanked against each other numerous times, scaring both the battling gizmos and Marie as they thought they might die there and then. Ethan moaned just to let the ex-girlfriend trapped in the piercing on his tongue know that he enjoyed this, far more than any kiss she had given him. Cathy seemed so cruel and mean-streaked, obnoxious and foul, but Ethan loved it more than any sweetness or warm words, and this fact alone was enough to slowly drive Marie insane over days and weeks, to know that being kind hadn’t earned her respect at all. She tried to rip the screen off the wall as she had many times before, screeching uncharacteristic profanities that damned both him and Cathy to hell. Marie didn’t care what happened to herself anymore, she was just desperate to see the two monsters burn for what they were doing. It was hopeless, until there was another sound above all the others that froze everyone; Marie stopped weeping, the crazed warring ceased, and Cathy and Ethan’s mouths parted as they turned to the window.

“What was that?” Ethan quivered. Cathy couldn’t reply, she was too fixated on catching earshot of what was happening outside. It sounded like a conversation of some sort, but it was off – the voices were Ethan’s and Cathy’s.
“Another one?” the Ethan-voice said, echoing and low. The Cathy-voice replied:
“Yeah, but this one’s different. Look!” The room shook a little, and the loose chip fell out of Ethan’s open mouth onto the ground, he didn’t know what to say or do. Marie climbed to her feet and watched the screen, staring out of Ethan’s mouth at the closed curtains at the window. Cathy began to manoeuvre slow and cautious to the sounds, stretching to pull the curtains across.
“Oh crap! This is the one you were talking about!” the Ethan-voice cheered, shaking the room and sending books flying off shelves and posters tearing from the walls. Cathy couldn’t suspend it for any longer. She ripped away at the curtains to send them both firing to opposite ends of the railing, and the light that flooded in revealed two colossal figures. One resembled Cathy herself, holding the room between two fingers, the other was Ethan. The giants were staring in at the room, and Cathy and Ethan stared back out before sharing a glance of horror and disbelief with each other.
“Is it for me?” the Ethan outside asked, reaching for the room.
“Of course! Just a fun little thing, not much,” the Cathy outside boomed back. She handed the gigantic Ethan the whole room and the place shook about again. Cathy couldn’t take this, she refused to believe it, and she ran to the bedroom door to escape. Swinging it open, it just revealed more wall.
“F-fuck, what?!” she cried, and Ethan rushed up behind her.
“What’s happening? Cathy, what’s happening?!”
“I don’t… I – I think… fuck! No no, no no no!!” Cathy clawed at the wall and beat at it, starting to break down and scream. Ethan tripped backwards onto the floor, his backside crashing into the chip on the ground and smashing it apart. Shards shot into his skin and he whined, looking back out at the version of him looking in.
“What can I do with it?” the Ethan outside asked.
“Anything, dude!”

Cathy leapt up from the floor and rushed to the window, banging against it with tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Ethan!” she yelled out, “Please, look! It’s me!!” The giant Ethan smiled and glared at her, cocking his head in bemusement. “Please!” Cathy continued, “Baby, it’s me, Cathy!”
“She thinks she’s real,” the Ethan outside chuckled. The giant Cathy looked in too and laughed.
“Honey,” she patronised, “This guy’s mine, your one is in there.” Cathy turned to look at Ethan who was lying on the ground in pain, struggling to articulate a single word. She turned back to the window and battered at it.
“Hey! Hey, I’m Cathy too! You can’t do this to yourself!! I’m you, you fucking bitch!” The Ethan outside interrupted with another laugh, much louder this time.
“I know exactly what to do with it.” He reached down to his trousers and began to unzip, sending Cathy rushing away from the window and into another spastic panic of shrill screams. He moved the room closer in towards his pants and tilted his hand so the thing started rolling inside.
“NO! ETHAN NO! DON’T!!” she squealed as her cries became less and less discernible. The room tossed around and cartwheeled on top of itself, mixing the furniture up together as though Cathy and Ethan had been shoved into a cacophonous blender set to maximum power. Everything went dark and the laughing voices became muffled, the room’s temperature already soaring with a thick moisture in the air. Cathy heaved about with Ethan on the floor, hitting him and pulling at his clothes.
“Let us out! Ethan, you fucking bastard! Let us out! Why would you do that?!” she wailed at him.
“Wh-what?! I didn’t!”
“Yes, you FUCKUNG DID!!” she screamed, ripping away at his trousers and searching for the room inside his pants as they both began to fight. “Let us OUT!! LET ME O-OUT!!”

Outside, the giant Ethan and Cathy could no longer hear what was happening inside the chip. He snapped his trousers shut and zipped them up, looking back up at her.
“It’s an awesome present, thanks!”
“Don’t thank me,” she said winking, “You can pay me back later, when we’re playing with them.” Cathy and Ethan held one another and pressed their lips together, smiling between pecks.
“Cathy,” Ethan muttered, “None of these things are alive, not really, are they?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, were just messing ‘round with toys, right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cathy said, “Just toys.”