Glib was carrying a small nuclear device to put in his new coffee machine. He’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed again, literally every morning his head was where his tentacles had been and his tentacles where his head had started. He spun like a carousel in his sleep. Coffee was his morning ablution for recovery – his sanction with his brains to jump-start the circuitry like a dry petrol engine.

Glib’s intestines passed through his brains. Brain donuts hung along a wet railing pumping all the trash out his body, that was the state of Glib’s insides. A lot of that trash was coffee. Brain and intestine being knotted together meant constipation could cause concussions. Glib drank coffee every day for health reasons.

Cough-Eye 2050: fourteen ion chambers at attention marching frozen in pairs of two, ten dispensing nozzels for parallelizing the spitting of black liquids, a clear dome encasing everything to protect a tentacle from any thrashing components, one-thousand multi-colored LED lights that provided an expressive channel for the machine to deliver emotional support via the undulation of color patterns, one sticker of a naughtily clad tentacle wrapping one ion chamber seductively (Glib’s personal touch), two micro-steam turbines for sucking hot air out of the micro-universe of spinning machine pieces, and a neutron moderator – cast in a neon green plastic – stamped right at the nose of the device with a divet the shape of a teacake which Glib was now ramming a small nuclear device into. His tentacle was tired from having been in a bed in an unconscious state for six-and-a-half-hours, so his SND banged a few times on the rim of the teacake inset before it found the mark.

Cough-Eye 2050 was happy to receive an SND. Its lights hummed in propagating waves of blue and green and the neutron moderator sprung to life like a green giant, if there ever was such a star species. Liquid the color of charcoal hacked up by a chain-smoking Devil would arrive in ten seconds. To Glib that was an eternity so he drove away the pangs in his brain by looking through his selection of KipKop music that he had… – Plit! The coffee was done. Glib had four-hundred and twelve suction cups along his back. Right now these were pulsing almost with nervous energy anticipating the buzz that was about to smother his nervous system. Glib didn’t know he was pulsing like this.

Where Glib had carefully rammed the SND there now was no more SND, just a divet the shape of a teacake. The same teacake, the same divet. A subtle buildup of black residue near the deepest point of the teacake pit in the neutron moderator was the only evidence that the device had been used. Glib liked the Cough-Eye 2050 because it was zero-waste, something that was important to his personal identity. He liked to tell friends that came by all about how his machine was zero-waste, even the liquid required for cooling the ion chambers was just a small cup of spit he collected every third morning. Friends usually saw the Cough-Eye 2050 and, mistaking it for a Cough-Mouth 1010, carefully scolded him on how environmentally unfriendly those machines were. It made Glib’s friends feel good to feel more environmentally friendly than Glib. Glib would counteract with saying that, no, it was a Cough-Eye 2050, proceeding to then demonstrate the ramming of SNDs into the teacake divet, the colorful light-show, the “plit!” of the Devil’s liquid, and the wonderful disappearance of SNDs. Prior models like the Cough-Mouth 1010 didn’t make the SND wonderfully disappear.

Somewhere in a small island off the coast of Mari-Santo a small child is scrambling tentacle over tentacle up a hill. The ground underneath each tentacle slides like gravel on ice as it tries to haul mass upwards. Its tentacles are a crosshatching of cuts and scars from the unforgiving sharp ground. A piece of ground is shifted loose from the child’s effort and flies down the hill, using the child’s head to soften its impact as it comes to rest face-up nearby. The piece of ground is the shape of a sphere cut in half, its the shape of a teacake. The child hears the familiar “plit!” sound nearby and automatically turns to the source just in time to catch the spontaneous appearance of another teacake in the middle of thin air above one of the hills nearby. The teacake falls and is immediately lost in the hill.