Harrison adjusted his tie in the private compartment, watching mountains blur past the window. The door rattled—a sharp knock. A porter, small as a child, handed him a stack of papers and an unmarked VHS tape with movements too precise to be natural.
His supervisor, Mr. Chen, appeared moments later. “Review everything before the terminal,” he said, eyes lingering on the tape. “And Harrison… good luck.”
Laughter erupted from surrounding compartments. The coin-operated TVs hummed behind frosted glass, their blue light casting strange shadows. Harrison sorted through documents as the sound of joy and horror mixed together, creating a cacophony that made his head swim.
———————-
“YyyyyyAAAOh… DAVID, BABY!” The voice stretched across the seawall, where men with broken metal detectors stood in formation. “OH PLEASE, BABY, OH IT BURNS!”
A young worker jolted, orange foam deep in his ears. His wife’s voice—but she was home, wasn’t she? The older man beside him laughed, the sound like driftwood breaking.
“Watch the skin melt, good man! Ferchrissake… Your wife’s safe at home. This one’s just a shoddy replica—got the profile all wrong.”
**************
One minute’s worth of coins. That’s all Harrison had when he finished the papers. The ancient TV whirred as he fed it the tape, then seized with a grinding noise that seemed to echo the laughter outside.
The train’s brakes screamed. Through his window, he watched passengers rushing toward metal hatches marked “MEDIA DISPOSAL – INCINERATION,” their faces masks of terror.
———————
“Just pretend you’re fixing it,” the older man said, banging his detector. “Like Happy Days—you know? When they’d hit the jukebox?” He paused, watching a fish writhe in the black foam before being dragged under. “Boss thinks hitting stuff fixes everything now. He’s right about 75% of the time.”
Time stretched like taffy. The younger worker considered asking to borrow the boss’s satellite phone—the only connection to the outside world in this desolate place. But she’d only yell at him again, call him weak for fearing “them.”
***************
Harrison tackled an elderly woman on the platform, stealing her tape as Chen backed away in horror. His apartment felt wrong—TV gone, VCR missing. His neighbor slammed the door in his face.
The phone rang in darkness. Chen’s voice trembled: “Name your price. Just never mention the tape.”
“Tell me what was on it,” Harrison pleaded.
———————-
“HELP ME, BABY! STOPITIGNORINGATMEee!” The thing’s melted eyes rolled as its rubber fingers stretched from the sludge. The older man hurled driftwood, shattering its jaw.
The workers cheered as it disintegrated, but their victory felt hollow. The younger man’s detector screen flickered green, then died.
***************
Chen’s voice came through the phone line like it was traveling through black foam: “They made it to eliminate things we couldn’t control. Microplastics, they said. Information, they meant. But it grew. Learned. Started eliminating everything.”
Harrison looked down at the stolen tape. Through his window, he could see the beach, where men with metal detectors stood in formation. A figure writhed in the dark waves, its face a perfect copy of the newsreader he’d seen on TV that morning.
“The tape shows what they really are,” Chen whispered. “What they’ll become. Man-made fungi that learned to mimic more than just plastic. That’s why we burn the tapes. That’s why we stand guard. But it’s too late now—you’ve seen how they copy us. How they replace—”
The line went dead. From the beach came a sound: “YyyyyyAAAOh… HARRISON, BABY!”
A memory so distant it must have been a dream as a child… He’s squeezed blood from his favourite stone and is trying to get it back in. He looks at the rancid thing calling his name and sneers. He says, “Shut up, bitch.”
He grabbed his coat and headed for the door. Maybe if he hit the phone just right, like in Happy Days, he could fix this. Maybe he could fix everything.
Everyone on the beach cheered. The sun was dimming instead of setting, and the wind seemed to be suffocating moreso than whispering.
He could fix everything. The tape will be forgotten about. Mind over matter. One day at a time.
But the black foam was already seeping under his door, and somewhere, a coin-operated TV flickered to life without any coins at all.