The Adventures of a Saintly Vending Machine

First published in SF Hōseki 2015 (Sci-Fi Gems 2015) in August 2015 by Kōbunsha.

I was working late at the office that night.

Time for a quick break, I thought, heading up the staircase to the roof.

The patent office at which I was employed was housed in an old five-story building, and whenever I needed a break from it all I retreated to the roof. There was a sense of post-apocalyptic melancholy about it all: the faded bench, the flimsy drying racks, the myriad bits of garbage scattered all around. Whenever I became fed up with slaving away at my desk (which was always) I would head up there alone to gaze at the sky and ponder where humanity was headed.

The rooftop of the adjacent building gave off a very different impression. It had a lush green lawn; a sparkling, futuristic vending machine; and white tables beneath rainbow parasols. “The grass is greener on the other side” doesn’t begin to cut it; it was more like the difference between heaven and hell. It drove me wild with envy. Only a few meters separated this building from that one, but it was a maddening, insurmountable gap.

I wish our rooftop had a vending machine, I thought heading up to the roof that night, but no sooner had I stepped outside than I let out a gasp.

Sitting smack-dab in the middle of the rooftop was a vending machine.

When had they installed it? I hadn’t heard so much as a whisper of it around the water cooler, and it hadn’t been there at lunch. Perhaps some god had taken pity on my solitary overtime labours and placed it here on this barren rooftop. Come to think of it, there was something mystical about the pale light which it shed upon the surroundings.

“However it got here, I’m glad it’s here.”

I jauntily walked up to it, inserted a coin, and pressed a button. But rather than dispense a can, the saintly vending machine simply sat there silently shedding saintly light upon my face. Surely it didn’t think it was going to get away innocently pretending that it hadn’t just eaten my money.

“Come on, just work, will you?” I pounded it with both fists.

“Whatcha doin’?” said a voice from the other rooftop.

I glanced over and saw a lone woman languidly leaning on the handrail at the edge of the rooftop. I’d seen her a few times before on the adjacent rooftop, though we’d never spoken a word to one another.

She was always alone, and I didn’t know where she worked or what she did. But she was beautiful in a sort of otherworldly way, as if her thin, spindly figure was only just held together by a delicate celestial balance. I’d racked my brain for weeks trying to decide who she reminded me of before settling on Mia Farrow. I rented a bunch of old movies starring Mia Farrow in her younger days—John and Mary, The Great Gatsby, Rosemary’s Baby, Follow Me!—and in my head I started to call the woman from the other rooftop Mia. You can all stop snickering now.

Whatcha doin’?

It was clear from the way she slurred “doin’” that she was sloshed. I walked over from the vending machine to the handrail. Laughter echoed from somewhere below in the chasm, likely a party being held in the other building. Perhaps Mia had slipped out of the soirée and come up here alone to sober up in the cool night air.

“Having a party? That must be nice,” I called. This was my chance to finally get to know her.

But the response I received was not at all what I had expected.

“Thief!”

“Thief?”

I was so bewildered that I couldn’t process what she had just said. As I stood there perplexed, Mia leaned forward, the look on her face saying, You’re not fooling anybody. It was bewitching. She raised her arm and pointed at something behind me.

“That vending machine belongs to us.”

It was only then that I noticed that the futuristic vending machine on the other rooftop which I had seen on their rooftop during lunch was no longer there. I turned around and looked at the vending machine. It did bear more than a passing resemblance, but I had no idea what it was doing over here.

“Look, I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a thief…”

“So you’re telling me that it sprouted wings and flew away?” she drawled unreasonably. “It ate my coin so I gave it a good kick, and then it just went poof. So I’m like, Where did it go? And I look around for it, and then I see you on your rooftop putting in a coin. Don’t you think that’s a little fishy? That’s gotta be our vending machine.”

At this point I was starting to get annoyed. For one whole year, fantasizing about this woman on the rooftop had been my escape from the tedium of my job. I’d secretly admired her from afar, I’d watched Mia Farrow movies on repeat, I’d gone out and bought Mia Farrow’s autobiography, I’d even pored over all the lurid details of the court battle with Woody Allen. And now the first words out of her mouth were to accuse me of being a vending machine thief? That was just too much. From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

“And how exactly am I supposed to have stolen an entire vending machine?” I spat, with a contempt which I had rarely heard in my own voice. “Unlike you, I’m on the clock. I don’t have the time to waste talking to someone who’s clearly hammered. If you want a soda so bad, you can come here and buy it yourself!”

I regretted the words as soon as I had said them. Mia’s expression froze over, and she immediately climbed over the guardrail, apparently intending to jump the gap. But the space between her building and mine was over five meters wide; even a sober person would have been hard pressed to make the leap, let alone someone who’d spent the evening throwing back drink after drink.

“Stop! Don’t do it!” I yelled, frantically gesturing with both hands. “You’re going to fall!”

Her arms hooked around the guardrail behind her, Mia glared at me. “I thought you told me to come over and buy a soda myself!”

“Look, I didn’t mean it, all right?”

“If you’re really sorry, then bring that vending machine back right this instant!”

“That’s crazy talk!”

“Then I’m coming to get my soda!”

Suddenly a man appeared on the other roof. The giant eggplant costume he was wearing made it pretty obvious that he’d just left the party himself. He was on the shorter side, and his thick black-rimmed glasses hung loosely off his scarlet face, which poked out of the costume through a hole. You could practically see the party mood steaming from his body as he danced a suave little two-step. But the instant that Eggplant Man saw Mia on the other side of the guardrail, the grin was wiped from his face.

“What are you doing!?” he shrieked, the bulbous bottom of the eggplant bouncing up and down as he swiftly waddled towards us.

“Get your hands off me!” Mia said, slapping his hand away. “I’m going over to get my soda!”

“Hey buddy!” I called. “I keep telling her not to try leaping over here. You’d better do something quick before she falls!”

“M-my apologies,” he stammered.

“You don’t need to apologize for her!”

Mia and Eggplant Man started to argue back and forth across the guardrail. They didn’t sound like coworkers; they were more like two lovers quarreling, or a talent manager trying to placate a spoiled starlet. Sweat dripped down Eggplant Man’s ruddy face as he desperately pleaded with her, but it was no use: each time he tried to approach her she would release the guardrail and impetuously wave him off, coming dangerously close to falling.

Eventually Eggplant Man took a coin out from his wallet and leaned over the railing, seemingly defeated. “Use this to buy a drink, would you?”

He flung the coin over the gap. I caught it, thinking how ridiculous it was that I had to be the errand boy, but there wasn’t much use trying to argue with someone who was sotted off her rocker.

“What should I get?” I shouted.

“Anything!” called back Eggplant Man.

“Don’t be stupid!” Mia added. “Get me a cola, or else!”

I inserted the coin into the vending machine and pushed the cola button, but nothing came out. I scowled, only now remembering that the same thing had happened to me minutes earlier.

“Work, you slacker!” I said, prodding it. To my utter astonishment, the vending machine smoothly skidded backwards about 30 centimeters as if it was on ice skates, flashing its lights in seeming displeasure at my violent act.

To say I was startled would be quite an understatement. “What the hell? Why are you running from me?”

I approached and took a closer look at it. During the course of my inspection I discovered that despite the fact that it was glowing quite brightly it didn’t seem to have any discernible power source. I got down on my hands and knees to look underneath and made an even more surprising discovery: the vending machine was floating ever so slightly above the ground.

“Now wait just one _motherloving _second.”

Sprawled on the ground, I turned my head up to look at the vending machine. The beatific light it emanated almost seemed to be whispering profound epiphanies directly into my brain.

This is no ordinary vending machine, I realized.

The opening scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey suddenly flashed into my head. A mysterious monolith descends without warning upon a shambling band of apes—a device sent by a vastly more advanced civilization of extraterrestrials, intended to advance humanity to the next stage of its evolutionary process. And just as fearfully as those apes approached that monolith on that blasted plain, so too did I now approach the vending machine on this desolate rooftop, this vending machine that had been sent in the year of our Lord 2015 to guide humanity to a higher plane of being. I, a humble patent office clerk, was about to become a being of astral ambitions. To paraphrase Sakamoto Ryōma, dawn was breaking over humanity.

I was so transfixed by these delusions that I completely forgot about the drama taking place on the other rooftop, until a high-pitched scream brought me back to reality.

“Who dares stand in the way of the dawn of humanity!?” I thundered, looking over to see that Eggplant Man had snuck up behind Mia and caught her in a bear hug. Surely he was attempting to keep her from falling. Then again, though I am loath to doubt the decency of my fellow man, the way his hands were fondling her chest seemed a bit suspect. Perhaps he was simply having trouble seeing out of that eggplant costume.

“Look out!” I shouted, looking on aghast as Mia flailed around trying to escape his grasp, but it was too late. As I’d feared, Mia lost her balance and went tumbling into the abyss.

“Oh no!” Eggplant Man shouted stupidly.

At that same moment, the vending machine disappeared.

I ran to the railing and looked over it to see Mia sprawled on top of the radiant vending machine, which was floating there without a sound,.

“Oh my God!” she gasped.

On the other rooftop Eggplant Man’s jaw dropped to the floor.

The vending machine ascended smoothly and landed back on my rooftop. Mia took my hand and shakily hopped down. She looked at me, then at the vending machine, then back at me, completely sober now.

“What is that thing?”

“It’s 2015: A Space Vending Machine.”

“Meaning?”

“It must be something else posing as a vending machine. I suspect it was dispatched here by aliens.”

Mia swallowed nervously. Bathed in the pale light of the vending machine she looked like a scared little girl.

“That’s not good,” she said. “I was just kicking it earlier.”

“If it was mad at you, it wouldn’t have saved you.”

“Oh. Right.” Mia let out a relieved sigh.

I watched the vending machine continue to cycle its lights on and off.

“Why are its lights blinking?” Mia whispered in my ear, though obviously I knew as much as she did. Maybe the saintly vending machine was trying to communicate something to us representatives of humanity. Maybe its lights operated on a special wavelength that was even now rewriting our DNA. When I said this to Mia, she took a step backward, looking creeped out.

The vending machine continued to blink silently.

“It’s Morse code!” I heard Eggplant Man shout. “SOS! SOS!”

SOS? I thought blankly.

Suddenly Mia screamed and grabbed my arm, pointing upward into the night sky. A bright object was blazing through the clouds at tremendous speed. It wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t a plane. It was an enormous vending machine, made up of countless smaller vending machines. In no time at all the colossal mecha-vending machine was hovering over our heads. Our surroundings were as bright as a summer day at the beach.

“What the hell?” Mia gasped. I only just kept myself from exclaiming the same thing.

The bottom of the flying titan was made up of hundreds of vending machines, each shedding pale light upon us. It looked so close I felt as if I could reach up and touch the rows of drink samples displayed above us. I even spotted an old-fashioned vending machine displaying Cheerio soft drinks.

The vending machines started to shift in orderly fashion like a sliding block puzzle, revealing a gap the size of a single vending machine.

Without a sound the vending machine on the roof began to rise upward towards its flying brethren, docking almost happily in the gap like a lost lamb returning to its flock. The vending machines all started to blink in an undulating wave of saintly light that swept over the body of the giant Megazord. Perhaps they were singing in vending machine-ese, welcoming their prodigal son home.

The colossus zoomed off, and in the blink of an eye it was gone.

After a second of stunned silence, I rubbed my eyes. Everything was plunged into darkness again, as if we hadn't just made contact with aliens, as if we hadn’t just glimpsed a new dawn for humanity.

“Hey,” croaked Eggplant Man. “So I’m not dead, am I?”

“Kitsune udon,” I heard Mia whisper, her voice no louder than a sigh.

“Come again?” I said.

“I saw this vending machine in that giant swarm that sold hot kitsune udon. I just thought that humans are kind of funny. All that futuristic technology gathered together, and all it does is sell hot udon.”

“I could go for a bowl right now.”

“I wonder if that vending machine is still out there…”

We stared off into the distance after those flying vending machines.

It seemed that humanity had been left behind, and I would have no choice but to go back to work.