It was the happiest day of my life as I stood there on the podium, about to graduate from vending machine school. The years of cla**es were finally going to pay off. There were the economics cla**es that taught me how to make the proper change from money being inserted into me. There were the contortion cla**es that taught me how to remain perfectly motionless for years on end. There were the foreign language cla**es that taught me to dispense the right snack when the proper combination of bu*tons was pushed. There was a great cafeteria to fatten us up to be as large as real vending machines, and to top it all off, the school had a great job placement program. Within moments, society would have gone full circle. We were going to replace the machines that had replaced us! We had programmed the machines to genetically improve their programming upon each successive generation. They eventually replaced the plastic, gla**, and metal in their bodies with flesh and blood. Now they were going to return the favor. They were going to replace our flesh and blood with plastic gla** and metal, so we too could know the joy of the pure unadulterated profit of loose jangly change that only a vending machine could know! But when we got to the transformation room, I could feel something was wrong. When they wheeled in the new shiny hand-crafted soulless vending machines, I knew they weren't going to transform us. I suspected they weren't even going to put our souls in these machines. They were just going to tell the world that these machines were us. They were really going to k** us and eat us.
(There's one thing that really disturbs me about that last story. I'm going back in time back to when I was a kid and saw the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. The whole time I'm watching this movie, I'm thinking to myself: Well he's gotta live! He narrating the whole story in past tense! This is a story that happened to him, and he is telling us that it happened. So then the end of the story happens, and he's shrunk away to nothingness, and I'm thinking: Hey man! He's shrunk away to nothingness! How did he go back and tell the story? I've been sitting here for the past two hours suspending my disbelief, just to have it shoved back in my face like this? So the same thing happens with the vending machine story. Here are a few possible additions to the end to make it a bit more plausible. Special Ending #1: The Martyr's d**h: I am writing you this note in my own blood on the back of a candy bar wrapper I made off with in the ensuing battle. I do not have long to live. None of us do. I only hope someone in the free world finds this before it's too late. Special Ending #2: The In-Your-Face-Irony: And that's exactly what they did. Special Ending #3: The Cheezy Cop-Out: I suddenly woke up on a pool of sweat. You see, it was all a dream. Special Ending #4: The Cheezy Cop-Out with a Twist: I suddenly woke up on a pool of sweat. You see, it was all a dream. Thank god we machines aren't living in the past where humans had minds of their own. Special Ending #5: The Cheezy Cop-Out with a Twistier Twist: I suddenly woke up on a pool of sweat. You see, it was all a dream. Thank god we humans aren't living in the past where machines had minds of their own. Special Ending #6: The Completely Twist-Free Ending: Fortunately, they turned us into vending machines after all.)