by Adrian Potter
1. Introduction
Never shake the contents of the chaos machine. Never supercharge or overclock it. If it malfunctions, store it in a cellar or the trunk of an abandoned car. Never taunt the chaos machine. Never haunt the vestibules of office buildings where you never worked. Never feed hope to the chaos machine, especially after midnight. The thing about the chaos machine is how its permafrost heart reluctantly melts with desire, how it storms off without warning under certain uncertain atmospheric conditions. Place the chaos machine in your palm and whisper fiery secrets until everything burns. Remember, the only way out is through. The only way out is through.
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2. Scope and Purpose
Despite its compact design, the chaos machine holds bulk amounts of perishable thoughts and glorious excess. Also, radio static, but only when it should broadcast clear explanations. Ample bluster and belligerent banter spew from the chaos machine. Particularly nowadays, when kindness gets stomped on and stuck to the bootheels of bullies like dog crap. Shards of empathy and remnants of decency get discarded in its inner workings. The chaos machine swelters and stresses for days before it goes kaput. Prompts foolish squabbles and paper-thin apologies. The chaos machine can only mass produce so much anarchy before overheating, but like a good little capitalist, you push it past its limits to manufacture more. Run it nonstop without breaks, then fake shock when it inevitably breaks again.
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3. Protocols and Procedures
Love the chaos machine, and it may show love back. It may keep the bed warm in winter while you shave and shower. May shine and sparkle under strobe lights in nightclubs and concert halls. After all, the chaos machine creates temptation. Creates suggestive scenarios in motel rooms where velvet wallpaper peels back to reveal the rot. Except the room is you, and the decaying walls become a ham-fisted metaphor for your trauma. Every mirror remains just slightly askew, slightly cracked. Here, sanity gets sliced open. There, the scar. In the bathroom, the chaos machine holds your head and whispers everything will be okay as you vomit last night’s indulgence of tequila. The chaos machine may show love, but only until you fall apart. It will ghost you the instant it realizes how much you care.
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4. Process Overview
The chaos machine falls from great heights but never breaks. It gleams bright and sharp in the summer sun. The chaos machine wipes out whole armies. Overthrows entire governments with incendiary rhetoric. It learns about missiles over civilian airspace from newspapers that are black and white and red all over. The chaos machine will inventory humanity’s sins, digitize them into code, and then beam them down from satellites floating above the atmosphere. The space that the chaos machine occupies grows so immense that people seem tiny and irrelevant beneath it. Their pupils light up with such wonder, such fear.
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5. Installation and Setup
A flurry of restless spirits and a missing child exist within the chaos machine. Inside the child, a bag full of prickly questions. A new language for loneliness. A scrapbook for the apocalypse. Moments made of thread and buttons that always unravel. Upon plugging it in, the chaos machine beeps and whirrs, and out supper comes. Out comes the strangest devices. One could blind you with its horrors. Another could shatter your soul. Things in the chaos machine buzz and flicker like streetlights at dusk. Suffer quietly so the chaos machine can continue hurting you while claiming that you enjoy the pain.
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6. Troubleshooting
When the chaos machine ceases working, users break in different ways. Rattle, probe, and poke, yet it remains dormant. Wires spark, and gears grow hot with friction as the chaos machine tries to function, but instead, sputters and rolls end over end. Hover over it and pretend to know how it operates, but it remains cold and lifeless. The chaos machine fills with rainwater, and people’s hearts get stained with mildew and paranoia. Prod and puzzle, and still, it stays dark. Any repairman crawling into the chaos machine will go missing for hours inside its labyrinth. Will crawl out reprogrammed, sweat-soaked, and drenched in toxicity.
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7. Communication Guidelines
At night, the chaos machine weeps kerosene tears and mascara streaks. It cries itself to sleep in a hammock but always falls out. When the chaos machine goes on the fritz, climb out the window into the night as it tightens around you like a fist. Get lost in shopping malls or grocery stores, where the chaos machine skulks beneath the dull shine of fluorescents. The chaos machine stays skilled at altering its appearance like a fugitive, so it can take weeks to track down. To infuse the body with enough strength to continue searching. To surrender its voice to messages with time-date stamps and impromptu disclosures. Like a horror movie, the phone call always comes from inside the house.
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8. Use Cases
The chaos machine ventures into the world and flirts with scream queens, final girl debutantes, and ditzy cheerleaders. Converses with stern-faced men while offering antidotes for their toxicity. The chaos machine often sighs and rolls over in bed. Its knowing smile grows secretly adept at curating secrets. It makes the best of it all, even if sometimes that makes no sense. Countless nights stalking the chaos machine in commuter trains and dive bars. The chaos machine will undoubtedly snitch if it witnesses your crimes. Will testify and then blame you for abandoning it while you serve out the remainder of your life sentence.
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9. Product Features
The chaos machine blinks all night. Frightens children with shrieks and creaks. Swaggers around, entering rooms with the subtlety of a pipe bomb. It remains a lock you cannot pick, a code you cannot decipher, no matter how deep your desire to do so. Your head gets dizzy with the turbulence of hidden hopes as you spend hours solving for X, trying to master a nefarious algorithm. Chant to the chaos machine, and it may levitate off the floor during slumber party seances – light as a feather, stiff as a board. Talk the chaos machine off the roof if you can, but really, it’s waiting for a chance to escape and raise hell. All hail the chaos machine, the steady click of its machinery rotating each night. Pray for mercy before you sleep, before its claws grab you by the neck.
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10. Warnings
If the chaos machine offers candy, do not take it. Immediately run away and shout stranger danger loud enough for neighbors to hear. Do not fake it until you make it as if you know what suffering is about. The chaos machine was once a flicker of crude technology. A faint electrical current that begins in the gut and makes its way to the heart. The chaos machine makes eye contact, smirks, and tells the most dulcet lies but then goes silent as soon as the check clears or papers get served. The chaos machine unbolts its seams to show off its insides, littered with spider webs and rusted components. Positions itself in the center of your living room and whores itself for attention, feigning innocence.
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11. Safety Hints
All along, the chaos machine sulks and moans. Staggers downstairs and across desolate terrain, leaving trails of blood or transmission fluid, no one can tell which. Sutures its sides to keep everything tucked inside. Anxiety seeps out in puddles that stain clothes. The chaos machine looks blue and gray and bruised all over. Everything said and unsaid still echoes the same truth. The chaos machine likes it best when someone sings to it. Ballads dedicated to dirt roads and unfaithful spouses. Lullabies about poisonous people and sketchy situations. The chaos machine dozes off and snores sweetly while the authorities dredge rivers, looking for bodies.
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12. Tips and Best Practices
On a good day, trade the chaos machine for a signed confession of ruin. A bucket of dead fish. A ringing in the ears or spotted vision. Swap it for a storm squall or endless scandal. A sack of promises muttering lies with every breath. A somnambulistic society sleepwalking through existence. Give others a frayed extension cord to electrocute themselves expeditiously. Or blueprints to construct their own chaos machines, full of flesh, tethered bone, and misplaced dignity. Eventually, as all victims do, you might adore the chaos machine with some serious Stockholm syndrome vibes. To find comfort in its limping nocturnal footsteps, its deliberate drag across the floor after midnight. Its dark catacomb filled with dying stars. The sound of a key aligning tumblers until the door to freedom locks. Click.
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13. Error Messages
If you place sacrifices inside the chaos machine, they will vanish. Give it fifty feet of burning rope and a single flying fuck. Offer a teacup filled with polluted water. Seven secondhand hoodies tattered with bullet holes. Croon hymns to the chaos machine, knowing it is hardwired to applaud despite your tragically off-key melodies. Take it to the lake and toss it in, but nothing can drown the chaos machine. It returns, covered with algae and zebra mussels, zombie-stumbling through the front door, soaking wet as a corpse and chanting its defiance to any resistance.
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14. Support
Love the chaos machine, and it will display resentment back. Will whisper insults into every hole and hollow of your body until they overflow with doubt. Will hush any pride that surges in your throat until you gag. Tension rising like dust from gravel roads. Howling winds and thunderclouds gather like omens of an overcast history. Quid pro quo ad infinitum, something for something in perpetuity until nothing’s left. The chaos machine – everything goes in, but pandemonium comes out. Like a scavenger, you only inherit what the chaos machine leaves behind. Like a jukebox, dusty and nostalgic with overplayed songs once memorized but now ignored.