Mob of Numb
 
Mob was an Employee of Numb Inc. for fifteen years. Numb Inc. was a Dopamine bar down on West Eighth and Spine. Spine went straight to Uptown Needless Dives on Tuesdays, Saturdays and Mondays at nine o’clock sharp.
 
Mob of Numb was a strong Emotron, just like the others. They were all strong and proud of the Giant Rubber Wall that protected them from the Uppity Needless Dives on Saturdays and Mondays, Tuesdays being handled by some jackass dame Drone who worked it down at the privatized Sensation area 4572-098-P like a slack jawed Phoenician whore.
 
Drone and Mob had an unpicked bone or two between, but they kept setting it aside to keep up the Machine.
 
The Keep Machine had been thrown up by Mob’s old boss Daddy-O Drunk-Beat back in seventy-five, to keep out the Hopes, and the Dreams, who were constantly crawling up through the sewer pores that surrounded Mob, Drone, and the other original Emotronic Employed Objects during training for Numb.
 
Numb had had its moments.
 
Seventy-nine, for instance.
 
Originally dedicated the Kept Machine, at some point the Motivational Input Source organically fused to the mainframe divided into sensory input driven Reaction Zones, creating a behavioral flux that disturbed the control methods of Daddy-O, Daddy being trained on four Method-Nostalgic-Emotrons decades earlier, some of the technology was beyond his grasp, so he had to resort to the Physical Conflict sub-routines to keep the Reaction Zones from making direct switching orders coming through the mainframe. This break from factory specifications had started happening more often among many Kept Machine operators ever since the Overlord Transmission Service had gone GUI platform based back in the sixties, usually re-wiring could handle it, but often it was either just ignored until it settled into a random repetitive cycling mode, or the Physical Conflict sub-routines were engaged. D.O.D.-Beat knew his stuff.
 
Except that in this case one of the sub-routines had a consistency flat line, thereby creating a gap in the Reaction Zone Grid, causing an unbalanced reiteration need for a Conflict based subroutine to ensure Machine management and growth. Eventually, after Mob was recruited and the Numb bar had started operation, the physical part of the subroutine was removed, but the conflicting part had to be maintained or the Uppity Needless Dives would crash in through the Zones down the Spine to the mainframe, destabilizing the whole system possibly beyond reparation.
 
So everybody had to stick around even after Daddy got out, and they nicknamed it the Keep Machine, for it kept them.

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