“Maygan is that you,” Scooter said, picking up the comm from his desk. “I was about to head out and thought I heard something. Good thing I came back,” he said. 

“I need a small favor from you. *OOOOFFFF* You said we had a therapy cat. Jabba, right?”

“Yeah that’s right.” 

“OOOOOOFF! Well I need you to get Jabba’s litter, as much as you can carry and bring it here to the bathroom.” 

“Gosh Maygan, those things are heavy. You need them now?”

“Now would be nice,” she said. 

“Okay, I’m on it.” 

“As fast as you can. I’m counting on you, Scooter.”

“What is the kitty litter for,” Scooter asked while Maygan made strange noises over the come. Like she kept falling down or something.  

“I appreciate the follow up question but let’s take this one offline, Scooter. Every second counts. OOOOOOOF.” 

Scooter left the converted janitor closet that was his office and walked briskly to the cafeteria.  His sneakers were relatively new and made each step squeak loudly. Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak. Wherever he walked sounded like a professional basketball game. 

“Where do they keep the kitty litter,” he said out loud to no one. The cafeteria was empty.  Maygan’s warning sang through his head.

As fast as you can. 

“Crud.” In the cafeteria he tore through the cupboards, throwing paper cups, plates, salt packets, plastic utensils, tea, coffee, napkins into the air, looking for the prize: Jabba’s stash of kitty litter. He had remembered seeing it, but where?

I’m counting on you, Scooter.

“I know, I know,” he said out loud. “I’m doing my best!”

In the commotion, Erma, Olga, and Gert, three heavily modified FoodDestroyers now employed as the kitchen staff, leaned around the corner, one head above the other, robo-eyebrows raised. Gert, the one on the top, squinted with its robotic eyes. 

“Hello, Mr. Scooter. Can we help you find something,” Gert asked, blinking rapidly. “We’re here to help!”

Scooter always suspected this was the de facto leader of the group. Gert was essentially a cylinder half the height of a man (or nearly the full height of Scooter), with a wobbly, spring-loaded head balanced at the top. Since it was a FoodDestroyer, it had an expressive face, capable of communicating emotion-like responses. Each FoodDestroyer had six, fully-articulated arms, each used for different purposes. Some had finger like appendages for grabbing, some with mixers, some with towels. Tucked away for safety were the ones used for chopping. Gert’s exposed neural net glowed a calm blue. 

“I need the bag of kitty litter. It’s an emergency,” he cried, with the contents of the cupboard in front of him flying through the air. 

The tallest one, Gert, wheeled itself out first, zooming over to Scooter, avoiding the landscape of kitchen supplies scattered across the floor. Olga and Erma remained mostly hidden behind the corner of the wall. 

The neural nets on the three robots dimmed and brightened with a rhythmic pulse, as if communicating with each other. Someone had put bright red paint around their speaker holes on the head to give the appearance of hastily applied lipstick.  The eyes were oversized for the head and upon which was balanced a healthy pair of robots-eyebrows. 

Erma made an alarmed sound. “Oh, goodness. We hope our cooking did not cause the explosive leakage. We assure you we use only the finest ingredients, cooked in the same homestyle, old-fashioned way.” 

As fast as you can. 

“Do you know where it is? I need it now,” Scooter said. 

“Well, I’d say it was by the napkins and such, but if you’ve already looked for it, and it wasn’t there, I can’t say I’d know of a better place to look.” 

Erma, the big one, rolled in on her treads. She had the same aesthetic additions as Gert, but Erma was wider and shorter. Scooter wasn’t sure, but it looked like she either had an oven or a microwave embedded in her chest. “As much as we’d like to help you, we’re busy preparing meals for the next few days.” She rolled closer to Scooter who was busy tearing through a cabinet under the sink, searching desperately for the kitty litter. “And since we’re going to be very, very busy, we won’t have time to put all of these things back where they belong,” she said while motioning with her knife arm at the contents of the cabinets scattered all over the cafeteria floor. 

Scooter stopped and looked up at Erma, glowering above him, robot-eyebrows furrowed. The lights of her neural net had turned from cool blue into burning red. 

He looked at the carnage he spread across the cafeteria floor. “I’ve made a big mess,” he gulped, “but this is absolutely urgent.” His voice cracked. 

Olga approached last and sealed off any escape route Scooter might have had. Olga was somewhere between short Erma and tall Gert. Her specialty appeared to be blending and dispensing liquids as some of her arms were hose like and some had mixing blades. 

Now there were three disappointed FoodDestroyers above him. “What is the urgent matter? Perhaps we can be of assistance. Dickhead.” 

Scooter suddenly felt in danger, but he remembered Mister McQuarry’s absolute requirement to keep this matter quiet at all costs. Scooter didn’t know if the FoodDestroyers Olga, Erma, and Gert, had privacy settings set to keep secrets, or if whatever he told them in confidence would be plastered all over the company Wiki page by the next morning. 

“Well, it’s not something I’m really allowed to talk about. But Mister McQuarry has authorized,” he paused to make a sweeping hand gesture to encompass the mess scattered everywhere, “this.” 

Gert straightened and her eyes lost focus. A dialing noise emanated from her midsection. A phone ringing somewhere. 

“This is McQuarry.” 

“Greetings Master McQuarry, this is FoodDestroyer Gert 7 from the kitchen station. Is Mister Scooter authorized to make a giant mess of our cafeteria?”

“No. What-” 

“K thanks bye.” The phone hung up and the three FoodDestroyers again pushed in uncomfortably close to Scooter. Their chassis pushed against his flesh, and not in a cool sexbot kind of way. Where the ceiling once was, three sets of robot-eyebrows furrowed, eyes blazing red. 

As fast as you can. 

“Okay, I’ll clean it up. But it has to be before I leave today. I have to go help someone. But it’s important I find the kitty litter. Immediately.” 

The eyes and hairnets changed from red to blue again. “That is an acceptable deal. Before you leave you must clean up and organize all the supplies that I now see scattered across my cafeteria floor.” The other FoodDestroyers backed away from Scooter to join by Gert’s side. They each moved to an unexplored cupboard, removed the contents, and dumped it onto the floor in a great pile.

“Clean and organize,” Gert reiterated. 

Olga rolled over to the massive employee refrigerator and opened it wide. Inside was a tomb of forgotten unspeakables and unidentified lifeforms. The smell was lethal.

“CLEAN AND ORGANIZE,” Gert blasted out of her speaker hole. The windows rattled with her words. 

“Okay, okay. Got it,” Scooter said.

The FoodDestroyers, content that the mess would be resolved, resigned themselves to the role of food preparation slave, and returned to the bowels of the kitchen one after the other.

 

Scooter sorted through the contents of the cabinets, now in a massive pile in the kitchen. The kitty litter had to be there. It’s where they kept all the supplies.

Scooter, I’m counting on you. 

But the kitty litter was not in the kitchen.

“Darn it all,” he said. “Think Scooter, think. Where would they put the kitty litter,” he said to himself. 

“Next to the litter box,” Hank Steve, the man with two first names, said as he walked through the cafeteria at his usual slow pace, oblivious to the catastrophe happening upstairs and the mess in the cafeteria. “Those things are heavy.” 

“But where is the litter box?”

“Basement. No one wants to smell a dirty litter box.” 

Scooter was off like a shot, running faster than he ever had. There was so much at stake that he shouldn’t have minded the squeaking of his shoes on the tile floor. But it did bother him. Squeak squeak squeak squeak. And it was loud. He didn’t want to disturb anyone who might still be at work, so he stopped and kicked his shoes off and ran like his hair was on fire.

The halls were empty, so Scooter found the litter box quickly. It sat in a small little cubby, tucked away from view. It would have been hard to find except for the small privacy screen someone had put up for Jabba’s benefit. On it were pictures of cats chasing mice and the words “shhhhh, I’m a shy pooper” on it. Scooter had seen Jabba recently, and he guessed it was a long time since Jabba chased anything. But it struck Scooter as odd that they would put a HoloGolf machine so close to a place where Jabba did his business. That machine was loud and obnoxious. 

Next to the litter box was a wall of cubbies, which likely hid the kitty litter. “Time for a tee-rific game of golf? Stop putting around and get to it,” the automated announcer said sensing Scooter getting close. 

Scooter had never seen the machine before, but then again he rarely ventured down to the basement. It was usually packed with old folks that worked behind the F&D security door, coming out for a break for whatever mysteries happened inside.  Come to think about it, most of the people in F&D were what Scooter considered “geezers.” Scooter had never been allowed inside F&D. 

“Let’s par-tee!” Scooter burped and shook his head. Puns made him queasy. 

There it was. On the bottom shelves of the cupboard. Twelve enormous bags of kitty litter. Jabba was a big cat so he must have used a lot of litter. Scooter knelt down to get it, but as he reached for it, it seemed to move away from him. 

But that’s impossible, he thought. It somehow seemed farther from him as he moved to grab it. He reached and stretched, and still it remained out of reach. He climbed into the cabinet, crawling towards the bottle, which seemed to move farther and farther away from him. The cabinet was so much deeper than he expected. Somehow roomier, spacious. But he crawled on towards the bottle. 

There was a light all around Scooter. Did he get turned around inside this cabinet? Was it so big that he might have gotten lost? And which way was up or down?

In the span of a thought, the light inside the cupboard was now bright as daylight. The wood of the cupboards under Scooter’s hands, now rough and dry like gravel. Warm air moved across his back. 

Scooter stood. He stood on ground not made of tile but of gray ash. The sky was a great bloodshot eyeball, shedding fiery tears upon the earth, the dark pupil casting an unsettling shadow upon the world. Trees made of what appeared to be human appendages, arms, legs, fingers, swayed as a hot gust of wind swept the dust of the land across the landscape. 

Airplane sized winged centipedes flew overhead, as they snapped at each other. Their shrieks echoed across the barren landscape. The kitty litter which moments ago was within grasp was nowhere to be found. 

Scooter tapped the comm button on his shoulder. “Maygan, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ve run into a teeny-tiny setback.” 

The pupil of the giant eyeball rolled across the sky stopping at the horizon. It fixed itself upon Scooter. 

“Intruder,” a voice loud as thunder said. A voice from everywhere. The monsters flying overhead ceased their snapping and moved their bodies in the direction of Scooter. 

Scooter I’m counting on you. 

“Well this probably isn’t great,” Scooter said.