Vell Harlan and the Doomsday Dorms

Vell scratched away at a rune in silence. The daily apocalypse had been dealt with in swift order, giving Vell plenty of time to work on some personal projects. He put his carving tool down just long enough to check his notes, then took it in hand again to continue carving the rune. Each line had to be carved delicately, and in a very specific order. Even small flaws could completely ruin the rune.

“Vell!”

Harley slammed the door open with her usual gusto. To Vell’s eternal credit, he kept his hands steady and didn’t scratch his rune. He didn’t know if it was cute or sad that he’d already accustomed himself to Harley exploding into his life unannounced. He put his half-carved rune down and turned to her.

“Yes, Harley?”

“Come take a walk around the dorms with me,” Harley said. “It’s picture day!”

“Picture day?”

“Vell, you really got to get involved in school culture. Come with me!”

When Harley said “come with me”, it was a statement, not a request. She latched on to Vell’s arm and forcibly dragged him out into the hallway, to the door of the neighboring dorm. For some reason, it had a blurry photo of planet earth attached to it.

“Oh, real fucking original, a satellite photo,” Harley said.

“I’d complain with you, but, uh, I have no idea what I’m complaining about,” Vell said.

“Oh right,” Harley said. She’d skipped the exposition. “Picture day is an Einstein-Odinson tradition where freshman compete to take the worst possible pictures of themselves and their roommates.”

Vell looked up and down the hall. Every door was similarly decorated with an incredibly bad photograph, with humans only even vaguely recognizable in about a third of them. Vell looked back at the blurry satellite photo.

“I take it this is a bit low-brow, as far as intentionally bad pictures go?”

“I guess it must’ve been clever the first time, but now it’s just overdone,” Harley said. “Come on, I want to see what Joan and Freddy did!”

Harley led the way a few doors down, to their friends neighboring dorms. Joan, being the only occupant of her dorm, had taken a selfie -using an image capture with one of her own prosthetic eyeballs, if the empty socket on her face was anything to go by.

“Well, that’s definitely a bad picture, though maybe not for the right reasons,” Harley said.

“We just talked about the eyeballs thing,” Vell sighed.

“Guess you better talk again,” Harley said. “Let’s go see what Freddy did.”

The duo stepped one door to the left and took a look at the picture on Freddy’s door. It depicted Freddy and his three roommates. Or at least they were pretty sure it did.

“It looks Freddy...adjacent,” Vell said. All the parts were there, but everything seemed slightly off. The eyes were almost but not quite the right shade of green, the freckles were all slightly out of place, and the hair had an oddly synthetic texture. A thousand minor errors worked together to create something unsettlingly almost-Freddy.

“This vexes and confuses me,” Harley said. She immediately slammed a fist against the dorm room door. “Frizzle! Explain your witchcraft!”

Since it was Harley doing the knocking, Freddy appeared all but instantly. Harley grabbed him by the shoulders and set him facing his disconcerting photo, demanding an explanation.

“Oh, yeah, that’s just an ordinary photo of us, but we fed it through a slightly flawed machine-learning algorithm to disassemble and reassemble our faces eight-thousand times,” Freddy explained. “This is actually one of the better iterations. You...you really don’t want to see iteration five-thousand and twenty-eight.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Harley said. Her morbid curiosity had limits. “Come on Vell, let’s take a quick look around and see what ideas are already taken.”

Vell followed along as Harley led him up and down the halls, voicing her opinion on every photo they saw. When they had finished their tour, Harley dismissed him with orders to win the competition, or else. Or else what, Harley did not specify. Vell felt threatened regardless.

This time, Vell burst into his own dorm. His roommates had returned during his guided tour, and were gathered in the living room.

“Guys! We need a plan for the bad picture contest.”

“We already have one,” Luke said. He gestured to a tiny glass case containing an insect and some wiring.

“Yeah, I got this computer hooked up to a cockroach’s brain,” Cane explained. “I’m going to capture a mental image of how the cockroach sees us.”

“Oh,” Vell said. “That’s, uh, a pretty good plan.”

“Surprisingly, people can accomplish things without you and Harley around,” Cane said. “Now get over here and say ‘Periplaneta americana’!”

Vell didn’t say that, though he did smile for the camera-roach. Cane checked the output to make sure it was shitty enough while his roommates waited around.

“What’s the prize for this contest anyway?” Luke asked.

“A gold star,” Renard said.

“You mean the borderline meaningless school ‘incentive’?”

“Yes.”

“Why do people put this much effort into it?”

“Bragging rights, presumably,” Cane said.

Exactly two days later, Lee texted Vell to let him know a winner had been chosen, though she did not say who. Vell inquired to that point with his roommates.

“I don’t know. Some chick on the third floor, I think,” Luke said with a shrug.

“No one we know?”

“Our social circle is like ten people, Vell, we can’t be involved in everything,” Luke said.

“We’re already involved in way more than we should be, statistically,” Cane added. Vell couldn’t argue with that.