Welcome to Flashes of Sanity! Your weekly (during July it is daily!) dose of flash fiction on 500 words or less.
Today’s entry: Death’s teacher
Enjoy!
”It’s called an automatic system,” Mort sighed. ”That means it is automatic…”
”Yes,” the manager scratched her head. ”But what button do I push to start extraction?”
”Okay,” Mort rubbed his temples. God, I need a drink right now, he thought.
”Let’s take this from the start…” Mort dragged the unwilling redhead to the bay. ”The cargo ship docks above these sensors which activates the extraction process. The extraction inlet is primed to recognize the infra-red light that has been part of all ships since the sinless year.”
”Yes,” the manager looked at the big metallic rods way down in the fiery water. ”The only year we ever had that problem. Rather the opposite in recent years.”
”Exactly,” Mort continued to the tank. ”The soul extraction starts immediately, and once the cargo ship is empty the inlet let’s go. Automatically.”
”Just like that?”
”Just like that.”
”What was wrong with the old way?”
”You needed thousands of employees just to run the machinery. Now we have pushed it down to two. That is very beneficial. You know what they say, in today’s economy employees are the highest expense.”
”But it can’t be more expensive than all this?” The manager pointed downwards to all the machinery now building what was hell.
”It is much cheaper, even if the whole machinery broke down and you had to replace it all, you would still have money to spare in comparison to running it on manpower.”
”I have it very difficult to believe that.”
”Please,” Mort wanted to pull his wings off. Even Bilk would have understood the gist of it by now, Bilk was smart though. Constantly drunk or high, but smart none the less.
”Just try to understand. You don’t want to end up like the grogoran hell, don’t you?”
The manager flinched and her mouth turned into thin line. No one wanted to be replaced with boars. That was the rule among devils.
”Do you want me to explain again?”
The manager shook her head.
”Great,” Mort said. ”We are working on effectivizing the cargo ships but as of now we have some years left. How about some lunch?”
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DBJ 