New Flash Fiction: Apostropocalypse Now!

​What if the Age of Social Media and Texting has a permanent effect on humanity, asks Luke McKinney in our latest story Apostropocalypse? And you wouldn't believe the grief we had getting that through our auto-correct spellcheckers! Luke McKinney is an ex-physicist turned science comedy writer. His fiction has appeared in Mad Scientist Journal and Grievous Angel continues his cunning scheme of submitting to sites with the coolest names. You can read his columns in Cracked and at Zero Point Comedy – and you can follow him on Twitter at lukemckinney

Apostropocalypse
by Luke McKinney

We killed the apostrophe, but it was self-defense. Not much point in possessives when theres nothing left to possess. Ugh, still hurts to write “theres”. Still, better than unknowable tentacles spinning Escherian uncircles inside your skull!!!
Sorry. Multiple exclamation marks are a side effect of the process. Let me explain.

It started with PROJECT NETWORK. Idiots kept leaving cryptic notes in sealed journals inside locked chests in dusty attics before marching face-first into the maw of madness. What is the point in having idiots to trigger deathtraps if they don’t warn useful people? Thats their evolutionary function, Im sure of it. 

But no, the first half of all eldritch fatalities are an idiot deciding "Hmm, this venture worries me enough to write in my diary, but not enough to tell another human soul”. Then the second half is second idiots finding those diaries. People stupid enough to face insane death single-handed, or even stupider enough to find notes saying “Went to my insane death” and think “Hmm, sounds like a place I should go!”, and they all still thought their worries were too stupid to share.

So we built a system to share the stupidest ideas in the entire world. It works! Now people tell everyone everything! They refuse to even eat a sandwich without Instagramming it. You can be damn sure anyone investigating a mysterious ghost in a crumbling manor on Death-Taboo mountain will upload a gallery of photographs and probably livetweet their own evisceration.

NETWORK succeeded beyond our wildest dreams (all of which must be reported to our Combat Oneirologists). People started skipping sounds and whole syllables online. So we add a bit of code, a 140 character limit, and boom: no more apostrophe!!! Far fewer syllables!!! Suddenly an entire generation can’t even write an Elder God invocation, let alone incant it, and instead focus their spare insanity into far too many exclamation marks!!!!1! 

2 hard 2 lrn t words, u no? Fun 2 watch them try to say Ryleh in textspeak tho. Really high yeah? O RLY, eh? Reel I hay? Ha, if that sunken city thought it was bad being lost under the South Pacific, now autocorrect has buried it forever.

Disaffected youths with thumbpads couldnt co-ordinate a counter-phonal reality-distortion chant if their lives depended on it. Which is the exact opposite of the case. Now all the angry failures trying to scream horror into the world do it in comment sections under news articles. Where they consider the apostrophe more alien than anything they could summon with it. 

​Besides, who has time to sit around practicing pronunciation when you can stream video? That is not dead which can eternal lie, because eternity is far too long for people desperately clicking “close” on a through thirty second advert. The only thrusting horrors of flesh they see are porn. But the true savior of the species was unexpected: the Elder Gods have seriously lost their appeal since people started summoning videos of cute kittens.