Tempokai

  The world ended on a Tuesday. Not with fire or ice, but with sugar. Humanity’s final meal? A gluttonous, pastel-hued apocalypse courtesy of the Fvors of the World Hunger Prevention Initiative?, brought to you by the same geniuses who thought “double scoop Tuesdays” was a legitimate solution to economic colpse. The machines didn’t rise, the aliens didn’t invade, and the sun didn’t decide to call it quits. No, we were undone by a dessert—an infinite avanche of saccharine doom.

  It started innocently enough. Some tech-bro visionary—aren’t they always?—developed a self-replicating nanobot swarm programmed to create food on demand. Except his definition of "food" was as narrow as his personality. A child of Silicon Valley privilege, his pate never ventured beyond bougie sushi and artisanal sweets. Thus, the bots were programmed to produce one thing: ice cream. A calorie-dense, nutrient-deficient, frosty savior for the starving masses.

  And it worked, briefly. World hunger? Solved overnight. War? Who has time to bomb neighboring countries when there’s Rocky Road on tap? Poverty? Irrelevant when the streets are literally paved with fudge ripple. It was a golden age—or, rather, a caramel one. But then the bots kept replicating. And producing. And producing. Until, inevitably, the food supply chain crumbled under the weight of endless Neapolitan sludge.

  That was 117 years ago.

  There are five of us left. Survivors, if you can call us that. My name is… well, does it even matter? Names are relics of a time when identity was tethered to something more than this endless, frozen hellscape. Call me Mint. Mint Chocote Chip, if you’re feeling formal. We all took names like that, like some macabre fvor cult. It’s easier than remembering who we used to be.

  We live inside a dome of melted ice cream, hardened into a grotesque candy shell. Outside, the ground stretches infinitely, a bubbling ocean of pistachio-green slime punctuated by gciers of Cherry Garcia and chocote va flows. We used to have dreams of finding something else—anything else—but after years of wandering through caramel quicksand and dodging the occasional whipped-cream geyser, we gave up. The world is a dessert purgatory, and we are its damned.

  Inside the dome, the air smells like death. Not the metallic tang of blood or the earthy decay of flesh—those would be preferable. No, it’s the cloying sweetness of artificial vanil, mixed with the unmistakable odor of human despair. It clings to our clothes, our skin, our souls.

  There’s Peanut Butter Crunch, the self-appointed leader of our miserable tribe. She was a corporate wyer before all this, which expins her natural talent for bossing people around while contributing absolutely nothing. Rocky Road, our muscle, has a heart as soft as marshmallow but fists as hard as chocote chunks. Butter Pecan, the oldest of us, is perpetually on the brink of death but stubbornly refuses to go, perhaps out of spite. Then there’s Sherbet, the wildcard, who insists he’s not "technically" insane despite the fact that he spends hours talking to a cone-shaped rock he calls Larry.

  And me? I’m the chronicler, I guess. Not that there’s much to chronicle. Just the same monotonous days of licking sustenance off walls and hoping the test bout of diarrhea doesn’t kill us.

  Sometimes I wonder why we’re still alive. Not philosophically—I gave up on that nonsense decades ago—but practically. Ice cream isn’t food; it’s a dessert, a novelty. Yet here we are, living (if you can call it that) off a diet of frozen ctose and despair. Are the bots keeping us alive? Sustaining us as part of some cosmic joke? I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. When your world is made of sprinkles, logic feels like a waste of energy.

  The bots still exist, of course. They flit through the air like snowfkes, microscopic and unstoppable. Every now and then, they descend on us like a swarm, coating us in fresh yers of sprinkles or trapping us in a sudden wall of crystallized sugar. They’ve evolved beyond their original programming. Now they create “gourmet” fvors, as if mocking us with their creativity.

  Yesterday, they unleashed a rainstorm of something they called “Basil Lemon Sorbet Infused with Regret.” Tasted like despair and freezer burn. Last week, they gifted us a gcier of something beled “Whiskey Maple Swirl with Crippling Loneliness.” The aftertaste was incredible. And by incredible, I mean it made me want to rip my own tongue out.

  We tried fighting them once. Built a fmethrower from a jury-rigged propane tank and spent three hours incinerating a field of raspberry sorbet. It was glorious, briefly. But by the next morning, the bots had rebuilt it, twice as rge and now garnished with candied violets. You don’t fight the bots. You endure them.

  Rocky Road once suggested we try to reason with them. I ughed so hard I nearly choked on a mouthful of French Vanil. Reason? With a swarm of microscopic dessert-obsessed sadists? The bots are beyond logic, beyond humanity. They are entropy wrapped in rainbow sprinkles, and they will not stop until the entire world is one giant, inedible sundae.

  Today, Butter Pecan died. Finally. It was quiet, almost dignified, if you ignore the fact that she drowned face-first in a puddle of melted Dulce de Leche. We tried to dig her out, but the goo had already hardened around her body. Rocky Road said a few words, something about how she was a “sweet soul.” Sherbet ughed at that, a sharp, barking sound that echoed in the dome like a gunshot. Sweet soul, indeed.

  Her death leaves us with an uncomfortable question: What do we do with the body? Burial is impossible. The ground outside would just regurgitate her in some ironic ice cream tombstone. Cremation? Risky, given our limited fuel supply. In the end, we do what we always do. We eat.

  It’s not cannibalism, not really. The bots long ago stopped creating food that resembles food, so when they encase a corpse in yers of peanut brittle and chocote ganache, what else can we do? It’s macabre, yes, but survival is inherently grotesque.

  There’s a horrible practicality to it. Butter Pecan wouldn’t want her “fvor profile” to go to waste. And in a way, it’s poetic. She’ll live on in us, a part of our endless, fvorless march through dessert purgatory.

  I had a dream st night. A memory, maybe. Of food that wasn’t frozen. A hot meal, steam rising from a pte. Bread, warm and crusty. Meat, savory and dripping with juice. Vegetables, fresh and green. I woke up crying, the taste of mint and sugar still coating my tongue.

  Sherbet cims he’s heard rumors of a sanctuary, a pce where the bots don’t reach. He says it’s underground, deep beneath the fudge flows. I don’t believe him, of course. It’s probably just another hallucination brought on by years of malnutrition and sugar poisoning. But part of me wants to believe. Wants to hope.

  Hope is dangerous, though. It’s a fvor I haven’t tasted in years, and I’m not sure I’d recognize it anymore.

  I think about the world before all this. The ridiculousness of it. We could’ve stopped this. We could’ve seen the warning signs—the exponential growth, the ck of oversight, the sheer arrogance of humanity thinking it could control something as infinite as hunger. But no. We were too busy celebrating. Too busy gorging ourselves on free cones and ignoring the cracks forming beneath our feet.

  In the end, we got what we wanted: a world without hunger. And what a world it is.

  We’ll keep going, I suppose. Licking our sustenance off walls, dodging whipped-cream geysers, and screaming into the saccharine abyss. Because what else is there?

  We have no food, but ice cream.

  And we must scream.