#fiada fey

Following a “bad trip” psychedelic drug experience, a teenager awakes the next morning to find the whole world reduced to apocalyptic ruins and everyone gone. Title: Aeon of Ghosts and Shadows

More depressed now than ever, he almost never left his apartment, logging long hours day and night typing up his highly bizarre and completely fictitious “autobiography” — filled with accounts of berserk knife-wielding NASA astronauts, clunky metal robots programmed to do off-color standup comedy, sinister tentacled space aliens with dangerous drug habits and strange sexual tendencies. Mainly, he just wanted to forget about his failure-filled life and the bleak unwelcoming world outside. Day by day, his “memoirs” became ever stranger, and visions of a multimillion-dollar book deal with one of the major New York publishers occasionally flashed through his head. The weeks and months of almost total isolation had turned him intensely eccentric. In his journal he’d written, “A shitload of Percocet? My own personal llama? A custom-made bong fitted with foam-rubber Spock ears?”— he was still on the fence how he’d spend his advance.

Extreme grief brought on by the death of his young son makes it difficult for a college professor to continue his secret life as a masked public masturbator. Title: Times Like These

The only human to survive nuclear doomsday occupies his time doing tarot readings for corpses strewn about streets and sidewalks, building ornate bongs out of animal skulls scavenged from the zoo, and constantly revising his schematic diagrams for a gigantic pinball machine he plans to construct from the wreckage of a crashed military fighter jet. Title: Liturgy for a Ruined World

A pinball machine struck by lightning acquires consciousness. Pilgrims journey from all corners of the Earth when it’s discovered that by inserting a quarter it dispenses profound spiritual wisdom in a staticky electronic robot voice. Title: Pop-Bumper Prophecies

Untold millennia after all life on Earth has vanished, alien archaeologists uncover the ruins of what they believe is an ancient religious site, but is in fact a 20th-century pinball arcade. Vast scholarly treatises are written on the spiritual significance of the phrase “insert quarters.”