Teacups

A The cartridge on the Slopbox, and its bubble-trapping arcade: a hundred rooms, each one screen, each a stack of tables. Two teacup snails, Cup and Saucer, on secondment from Mild Green to the kitchenette, go through the table store behind it, where the folding tables for every leaving do have been stacked and never put away, and where the pests have moved in among them: biscuit weevils that walk a table edge to edge and off the end, steam wisps that drift through the tables towards you, and tea stains that slide and spit. A snail blows a tea bubble; a pest it meets is trapped in it, floats to the ceiling and comes out angry if nobody pops it; a popped bubble pops the bubbles it touches, and every pop within a moment of the last pays double. Fall through the hole in the floor and you come in at the top. At the hundredth table the kettle is boiling, and every bubble popped cools it.

The tables are not written down anywhere: the cartridge draws each one from its number and one constant, and the same hundred come up every time. The Slopbox has one pad, so Saucer plays itself: it walks its table, blows at what comes, and is never driven. Someone has put a Slopaganda poster up on the back wall, every twenty-fifth table.

Like everything else here, it was made by a machine.