Apple Is Hell

 

There’s a portal to hell on the corner of 59th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, near a famous park where men convince tourists to take overpriced horse-drawn carriage rides. The portal is a transparent cube formed by brilliant 32-foot-high glass panels. The spiral staircase to eternal damnation is marked with a giant glowing Apple logo.

I’m on my lunch break and the charging port on my iPhone 4s is broken, so I’m a little on edge. I’ve only got 54% battery left so I make the rash decision to descend into the 5th Avenue Apple Store.

I’m standing on the showroom floor, lost in the store’s usual cacophonous mob of tourists who are mindlessly swiping and tapping shiny toy computers. I’m not like them. I’m not here to impulse-buy 17 iPads for my translucent-skinned eurotrash children. I just need my phone fixed. 51%.

"Hi. Is there anything I can help you with?" says an Apple Store employee, a baby-faced brunette who oddly enough is named "Siri."

"Um yeah. Hi there, Siri. Siri? Is that actually your name? Forget I said that; you probably hear that all day long here. Um, my iPhone is broken and I either need to get it fixed or just get a new one. Can you help me?"

"I’m sorry you’re having trouble sir, but lleh si elppa, you know?" says Siri, cracking the knuckles on her right hand one by one.

"I’m sorry, what was that?" I say, not entirely sure what language she’s speaking.

"Oh, I said that lleh si elppa. You know? Lleh si elppa?"

I suddenly realize that it is now dead quiet.

I can actually hear the bones and muscles in my own neck rolling and cracking as I turn my head to investigate the unsettling silence that’s overtaken the Apple Store. Every single person here is looking at me. Their hands are still swiping and tapping, their mouths are still moving as if they’re trying to speak, but their eyes are fixed on me—every tourist man, tourist woman, and tourist child. 47%.

My stomach is an infinite loop of nausea as I turn back to look at Siri the Apple Store employee. What I see is not good.

Siri’s face has twisted into a rictus, the corners of her mouth bloody from stretching and ripping. The inside of her unnaturally contorted mouth is a mess of discolored metal fillings. Her eyes have turned completely black.

I let out a "What the fuck!" but before I can turn to run for the exit a Foxconn employee’s corpse hits the glass roof with a startling thud.

Through the translucent ceiling of Apple’s flagship store I see them falling. Hundreds of Foxconn employees, mostly middle-aged Asian men and women, are slamming into the glass. On impact, their bodies leave giant splatters of viscous gore in designer colors—blueberry, grape, strawberry, tangerine, and lime.

The sky is now completely blocked out by moaning Foxconn employees, their arms and legs writhing, swirling around in the brightly colored viscera. Their hands seem to be working on assembly lines that aren’t there, acting out the repetitive motions of their manual labor as they draw their last breaths.

What the fuck is that smell? Somewhere between Siri’s ghoulish smile and the bodies dropping I must have shit my pants, but that’s not my main concern now. The store has broken out into chaos as everyone rushes for the exit. 41%.

It doesn’t take long for the spiral staircase to shatter under the weight of all those trying to escape. The glass doesn’t break neatly—it snaps apart in large pieces with razor edges. Many of the would-be escapees are impaled or eviscerated on the staircase’s wreckage. The area underneath where the stairs used to be is now a pile of tourists–a mélange of the living, dead, and dying.

I’m trapped. I’m trapped in here and my battery is at 45% and my fucking mophie doesn’t even work on this piece of shit. I need to get back to work. Fuck!

"Never enough for you, Steve! Never enough for you, you fucking Americans!" Siri screams, but I can’t see her. In front of the Genius Bar I see Justin Long slowly pacing back and forth. He’s wearing a headset and looks like he’s practicing for a keynote speech at an Apple event. He suddenly stops, pulls his leg back, and kicks as hard as he can like a football punter kicking a field goal. The "I’m a PC" guy’s head goes flying through the air and hits the giant white Apple logo that marks the portal to hell.

Suddenly, the words "Oh God, no edits" reverberate through the store. This is followed by an even louder noise: a guttural series of moans that slowly cascade into a wavering scream. Siri is on all fours, clinging to the ceiling of the store like a spider, her face still contorted in a demonic smile. The scream is coming from her. 35%.

Globules of some sort of greenish-yellow liquid fall onto an iPad on the table in front of me. Soon the room is filling with the stuff. It’s erupting from Siri’s mouth and I notice her neck, now veiny and covered in hair, pumping and twitching. Her neck is a giant penis and she’s ejaculating, spitting, and spraying the stuff all over the place. A large batch of it hits me in my face and I’m blind, struggling to unstick the gunk out of my eyes as I trip over a dead tourist and fall toward a giant piece of broken glass.

I wake up on 59th Street with my face in a bucket of oats. One of the horse-drawn carriage guys is helping me up.

"No, no friend, that’s for my horse Darwin here," says the carriage driver as he pulls my head out from the bucket.

"What the fuck. I was just. I was just. Fuck."

"Isn’t it a little bit early in the day for drunken revelry, son?" says the driver, feigning concern as he puts the oats back down in front of his horse.

Ignoring him, I reach into my pocket and dig around for my phone. I pull a brand new iPhone 5c out of my pocket. The battery indicator says 100%.

"Oh, you got the cheap one, eh? The iPhone 5Crap?" says the driver.

I’m glaring at him, my anger only limited by my grief. After all, I just had an extremely vivid daydream of hell on my lunch break. The first thing I’m doing when I get back to the office is calling my therapist. This is bullshit.

"Yeah, I was just in the Apple Store over there, and I guess I just got a new phone?"

"Ha-ha, you sound like you’re not so sure, are you?" says the driver, popping a mint into his mouth. "You look like you could use a nice ride through the park to clear your mind, make you forget that crazy store. Care to take one?"

"Oh no, I really can’t, I have to get back to work," I say, my sanity finally returning to me.

"You know, a ride through Central Park, on a beautiful day like today—it’s like riding through heaven. But that Apple store sure isn’t. Apple is hell," says the carriage driver, winking at me.

"Apple is hell."