I’m a volcano’s volcano. Vesuvius. Pompeii. Krakatoa. It’s about the artistry. That’s why my first eruption had to be perfect. I planned it for over 10,000 years—curating landscapes, correcting vibes, ignoring the constant, unbearable pressure building below my crust. There was always something wrong.

We knew we had a serious problem on our hands when the entire student body of Emerson Middle School began to show up in mismatched socks. It was weird, but it wasn’t middle-school weird. You see: the socks were all wrong, but all wrong in the right way. You look down and you see one kid’s got stripes on his left foot and polka dots on his right foot standing next to another kid who’s got checkered prints on her left foot and leopard prints on her right foot, and it all looks good together, as if the students had conspired to have the same color palette. And then you look at other socks and it’s the same thing. Technically, they’re all different, but technically they all go together.

I. Good evening ladies and gentlemen, non-binary, carbon-based and non-carbon-based lifeforms, robots, androids, mandroids, womandroids, womxndroids, and robosapiens. This is a regular meeting of the Space Station 5B-300218-ZΩ7 group of Astral Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Crewman-bot 5000-6C and I’m an alcoholic.

She said that she wasn’t amused but I believe that Queen Victoria rather enjoyed the camel ride. ‘It gets cold at night’, I called up to her, ‘out here in the desert. But the stars come out and it looks splendid’.

I was merely making conversation, of course. Her little legs were astride the beast. It must have been very hot for her, wearing all that mourning attire, that dress and all of those petticoats, but she was stoic.

The office of Squirrel Recruitment had the faint, sweet smell of damp documents and quiet despair. A single, wilted fern drooped in a corner, a silent testament to forgotten ambitions. Behind a desk sat Kafkett, a man whose suit had the bewildered look of something that had been through a car wash.

Across from him sat Normalson, a man so thoroughly beige he risked blending into the walls. Normalson clutched his CV like a holy text.