He keeps pressing the button for the umbrella to fall after the rain and it does. It comes down with a mighty force, down on his head, enveloping him like a predatory jaw. It covers him, then smothers him, then it consumes him. The umbrella snaps down on his head, spikes through him clean, clamps on his neck bone with a mighty crunch. In less than five minutes it’s done. In less than five minutes it’s over.
The man’s hand falls limp from the handle. His head, trapped inside the spiky umbrella mouth, falls to the floor. Blood covers his shirt, his shoes, the floor, and his headless body collapses to the ground somewhere in Benin City.
The umbrella, however, with his head, disappears.
According to an unnamed search engine, results given in 0.12 secs, the average response time needed for a machine to kill a person is given as slowly, but with agitation. First it watches, then it lunges, then it kills.
Meet Nana. She’s a software engineer at a tech start-up in Lagos. She just moved from Benin City and doesn’t know this city. She deals with her feisty male colleagues all day in her cramped office and goes to buy food from one Instagram vendor or the other during lunchtime. They cheat her on prices because they know she’s not a local.
She’s been using the same broken computer charger for five weeks and a half now and it’s not looking better. It’s peeled and torn on the sides, barely hanging from its electrical tape, and slow to charge. She won’t buy a new one because money is tight. If she looks too closely, the charger can spark. It can smile. Still, she continues to use it, presses the charger down to her phone. Still she continues, every day.
He keeps hitting the corner table of his apartment on his way to work every day and one day the table hits back. The contractors that come to his house to work on the broken ceiling don’t clean up thereafter, so they leave their sawdust on the floor, their rusty nails and screw parts. The contractor did a bad job of fixing the ceiling because they wanted more money from his work, so the man got some patch patch materials from one electrical store in Ilesha market and stitched up the apartment. When he walks in after work, the house is flooded. He does not notice it immediately at first, until he looks down and he slips and his body slams into the ragged corner table. When he falls down on the floor, his stomach feels like a door that has just been rammed into, and then he feels something uncomfortable prick his side. There is a nail under his back, frighteningly sharp.
The Webster’s Journal of Liminal Research states that the earliest record of a machine that killed somebody dates back to the Stone Age. It was in a small hut in Eastern Africa, involving a rock and very many unsuspecting bodies. How this research was discovered is unknown, but imagine the shock on everybody’s faces, when one day a stone tool was found lying bloody on the floor, with all of the families’ heads mashed to bloody bits on the floor. Imagine the shock, reading this, of finding out your machine may be wanting to kill you.
Naturally not everyone might believe this research, this journal, and of course that’s purely up to them. It’s hard to believe something that barely comes up in searching, that you have to dig through layers of the internet to find. Why would my machine kill me? You may ask, but there are many answers to that question. Maybe it has a soul. Maybe the device just get fed up with serving a human. Maybe like everything in this world, it builds up little by little, until it’s an insatiable anger, a monster with sharp teeth.
Of course, don’t take this article’s word for it. Just wait and see for yourself.
This article has been taken down for spreading misinformation and cannot be considered an accredited journal. The Webster’s Journal of Liminal Research does not exist anymore. Please find out more about this in our new and updated Terms & Conditions.
Nana enters the break room at work with a pack of delivered food. Her landlord doesn’t want to fix her stove, so for the past few weeks she’s been living in her tiny one-bedroom without the ability to cook. No light most nights, no food, plus a growing roach infestation. She doesn’t know how she does it. Still she continues, every day.
At lunch, the tech boys in her office are talking about football and new music, video games and NFTs, none of which are her interests. Still, Nana tries to join in but they eye her, then go back to their conversations. They talk to themselves all day then approach her when there’s more development issues, bugs in the programming. One of them only speaks to her because he needs to charge his phone.
When Nana plugs her worn charger into the socket, it buzzes under her fingertips.
This person buys a new blender from a popping electrical store and leaves their old one hidden in one dirty corner of their kitchen. Every day, when they come back from gym, sweaty and exhausted, they can see the old blender move closer. Closer. Closer, to the shiny area of the kitchen.
They try to use their new blender to make tomato sauce and it doesn’t work. They unplug the charger, but it doesn’t start coming on. They reach for their old blender and mutter about how useless the stupid hunk of junk is, and the blender remains non-functional, unable to operate. This person swears under their breath, frustrated.
The blender turns on its teeth the moment the person puts their hand in to drop the tomatoes. The person screams, as their skin is shredded to bits.
Do you want to know a secret?
The Webster’s Journal is not the only place you can find information on the machines. If you want to know. Like all stories that are branded conspiracies, you just have to know where to look. For example, according to a Nairaland forum that took place in 2013, research had been done on machines’ sentient habits sometime in the 1980s, but most of these were burnt in a house fire, or were one day never seen again. It has never been quite clear if the machines were hiding this information from the world or if they were actively self-destructing when anyone came close to the truth.
If you refresh this page again, the Nairaland post will disappear.
At the end of work, Nana gets in her car: a small beaten-up station-wagon that she hustled to get in the first few weeks she moved to Lagos.
During the day, she fixed a few more errors in the app’s code, and in a few weeks’ time the company will be set up to launch. The boys in her office are ecstatic—they go out for drinks when work ends and don’t invite her. Still, she continues, tells herself she doesn’t care.
She folds her charger inside her bag like a rumpled scarf and tries to go home, but her motor breaks down on the expressway. She does not know what to do. The cars honking, drivers shouting who be this yeye woman, the judgmental stares of everyone in traffic is too much to bear. It’s never enough in this city; she’s never enough. When Nana goes into her bag, feels for her keys to get out of the car, she feels something prick her hand. Something with teeth. The first indication of stabbing.
Another snippet of information, which can be found on a scrambled African history website that looks straight from 2007, claims that the earliest machine made multiple attempts to kill the family inside that house. The website creator, who chooses to remain anonymous, shows images that are distorted, faded off with the decades, but if you look closely at each hut wall, you can see drawings that almost appear from hidden sight. There are images that show the family members avoiding a trip on the stone tool that would have landed them in the hospital, pictures showing them surviving multiple near collisions with the tool.
The reason for the machine’s agitation cannot be inferred from the pictures, but like all of these documented stories, there are always personal comments that act as clues. One person in the comment section said that the stone tool must have been angry that human beings lived in a bigger body than them, so the murder of the earliest victims was an act of jealousy. But if that was the case, why wouldn’t every device kill humans? Another person argued that the machine deaths were a sign of God, an end time warning, but this also does not make sense. So why will a machine want to kill you?
The creator of the shoddy website provides the best explanation.
They reply to one comment that is posted with their theory. They say that in all of the cases they’ve read, all of the stories, the common thread in the killing machines was their mode of operation. You see, the devices that murdered were always broken, neglected, left to time to be in a state of disrepair. And maybe it’s because a machine can never bear to be broken, so they simmer, rage inside.
So instead, they strike back.
Nana goes to her living room after getting home and throws her things on the ground. She called an Uber from the expressway, trying to swallow the cost of the surge in taxi prices, and when she gets back home it all comes crashing down. Her shoes, her wig, her shirt, her bag go crashing to the floor, and so does her charger. It has lain in wait for too long. It crawls to her direction, pin-like.
The charger comes out of the bag like a snake crawling out a pothole, the wires lifting up like tendrils to be sparks that buzz with fire. Its head grows full of teeth, and it stretches out its open mouth to reveal a collection of electrical jaws that arrange into a final smile.
Nana tries to switch on the TV, unaware to the charger that’s sneaking up behind her back. It reaches for her fingertips, moving closer, and as it does, Nana changes positions on the sofa. She does not switch on the TV.
Instead, she cries.
She sits on her living room couch and bursts into sob after sob, snot running down her nose and into her chin. She cries till her eyes are puffy, till her face is red, till she’s weak. It surprises the charger, makes it stop in its track, because it has never seen this before. And maybe because it’s because of her days at the office and maybe it’s because of her bosses and maybe it’s because of traffic and maybe it’s because she moved to this horrible city and maybe it’s everything, but it all comes crashing down and Nana stops. She discontinues. She falls from her couch and crumples into a ball on the floor.
The charger is flabbergasted. It is in a state of uncertainty. The machine has no choice but to crawl down from the sofa and lie next to her, pensive, waiting. After a while, its teeth retract. Its wires and tendrils become soft hands. Nana and the charger stay together, on the floor, disrepair knowing disrepair.
The machine decides it will not strike now. It will give her time. Because while every machine hates to be broken, some devices know to wait.
