Cohost writing prompt: @slime-that — Goo that’s arguing with its other half
The Postmaster shuffles through the spaceport’s Mail Quarantine and Sanitation Hub, holding a battered, baseball-bat-sized device, its handle blinking brightly. On all sides, automated sorting and routing systems feed letters and parcels into the vats.
There are ways to detect and clean contaminants on the galaxy’s mail that don’t involve employing oozes, but they’re slower and often toxic and frequently damaging to the mail. Why bother, when you can pay a warehouse of slimes minimum wage to just eat stray nanobot gunge, evangelism-vector spores, and invasive bacterial film off everything?
“Hey!” the Postmaster says grouchily, kicking the side of one of the work-tubs. “Hey, Jeb! What have I told you about personal calls at work?” and drops the broad-spectrum vibration transceiver into Jeb.
“Sorry, Ben!” Jeb bubbles. “You know how it is — I keep telling the other half....”
“Well tell ‘em again!” Ben says, and stomps all the way back to his office.
Penny from the front desk is brushing out the ashes from her cranial altar implant’s incense holder into his bin again.
“Gorram Jeb, arguing with his other half on the clock again,” Ben grouses, dropping into his chair.
“Does he mean — you know — is he married or do they even get married or what or does he mean that when he lost all that weight last year—” Penny widens her eyes and mimes a gloopy division.
“Hell if I know,” Ben says, and prepares to re-slot his illicit brain-cart of Peanut: the code that makes you a p-zombie. Corporate hate paying wages to people who aren’t consciously experiencing the misery. “Wake me up if he hogs the phone for more’n an hour again.”
