Wow. I guess I'm in the minority here, since I really enjoyed this story.
Aside from the production (which was great) the way the story was told was amusing. I think I was grinning more or less constantly from the
SAM: Like?
BECCA: Like.
SAM: (growls like a dog, sexy)
Until Norm's "Heh, that was fun".
The whole single-scene story was absolutely absurd, and it tickled my funny bone.
I'm not sure which I liked more, the fact that (apparently) you need to be a cynical misanthrope to survive in this brave new world or that these two women were so self-aware.
That "we need to restart humanity" trope is so annoying that it often turns me off from otherwise good fiction. I'm glad that it has become such a running joke with them that they don't even need to explain the joke to each other.
Also, not restarting humanity with the same assholes who screwed it up in the first place is a very good idea.
The fatalistic view that maybe humanity's time on this planet is up and therefore it doesn't need rebooting made its brief appearance in my mind during this story, and is probably the governing philosophy of our two heroines. I won't say that I agree with it, but it's a refreshing new perspective in post-apocalypse stories.
Also I love how Twinkies are the only food to survive the apocalypse, and how she says that their computer is running Vista with a sigh of resignation and the line "she's a lesbian, I'm just lonely" and how....
But I can't list
everything I liked in this story, because that's pretty much the whole thing.
I do want to discuss some literary effects here.
"We like to keep track of time... so little of it these days"
Douglas Adams said: "Time is an illusion, lunchtime, doubly so." And that's very true. Time is only a thing of meaning because we give it meaning. We define time, minutes and hours. Without people, there really is no time. Sure there's daytime and nighttime and noontime and in-between-times, but that's just nature. It's not real
time, time needs to be measured by somebody for it to be called time. That (I suppose) was the point of the TICK-TOCK effects and the fact that they collect watches. That inside this little enclave, there are still people, and thus still time. But out there....
I'd say this barely grazes the "Science Fiction" genre, and would be better suited for a feminist magazine.
I think we all agree that post-apocalypse stories are pretty much all science fiction, automatically. Not sure how or why that happened, but that seems to be the truth of the matter.
Anyway, I loved this one.
Good job to all involved!