At 6:02 AM, the worker tube stirred in his fibrous cocoon. A pulse of mechanical sound had activated his neural attention centres, rousing him from a regenerative state. Without pause, he stepped into motion, his internal mechanisms powered by the stored chemical energy of prior consumption as it worked through his system. Adjacent, the smaller units of his colony—a mate and two juveniles—moved more sluggishly, their movements unrefined and erratic.
The worker consumed a mass of simple starches and proteins, their production requiring vast agricultural infrastructure; fields of monoculture rice paddies, livestock grazing lands, automated harvesting machinery. The sustenance was neatly arranged in disposable plastic containers, single-use packaging that would later become part of the collective detritus. For now, it served its purpose: fuelling his flesh tube for the day’s labour.
At precisely 7:14 AM, the worker exited his compartmentalised hive, a rectangular edifice constructed from concrete, steel, and glass. The hive was one of millions of uniform grey boxes stacked to the horizon, each emitting its own stream of waste gases and processed water. He descended into the tunnels below, joining the rhythmic swarm of countless others.
The tunnel systems were an intricate network of dense transportation arteries carved through the bedrock. The worker merged with the flow of others, indistinguishable from the masses. They stood shoulder to shoulder in a segmented metal capsule, their respiratory emissions clouding the confined space. The capsule surged forward, powered by a grid of energy harvested from distant rivers dammed into submission or furnaces fed with the liquefied remnants of ancient forests.
By 8:01 AM, he arrived at the cluster. Here, towers scraped at the planet’s atmosphere, their exteriors sheathed in mirrored panels to reflect the searing sunlight of midsummer Tokyo. Inside, a corporate organism thrived. The worker was one node in a web of data processors and communication relay points. He sat at his station—a plastic and alloy desk housing silicon circuitry that devoured electricity as he typed. Each keystroke sent packets of information across wires, building layers of abstraction for the vast logistical machine.
This corporation, in turn, was linked to hundreds of others. Its purpose: extracting value from the flow of raw materials turned consumer goods. Iron ore hauled from the guts of the Earth in Brazil became office chairs in factories outside Shenzhen, assembled by other labourers who lived in smaller, denser hives. Plastics derived from petrochemical refineries became smartphones, clothing, packaging. The corporation’s logistics web crisscrossed the planet, weaving oil tankers, air freight, and automated container ships into a seamless whole.
At noon, the worker consumed another energy packet. This time, packaged in rice paper and tin foil, the detritus promptly discarded. He moved without thought, his routines pre-ordained by the machinery around him. His corporation was only one cluster within the city, which pulsed like an open wound, haemorrhaging energy and resources. Food arrived daily, siphoned in from the countryside. Water flowed from distant reservoirs, pumped into pipes and drained into treatment facilities clogged with human excreta. Waste piled high in incinerators that belched particulate matter into the air.
Zoom further outward. The city of Tokyo consumed resources on a scale unfathomable to any other life form. But Tokyo was merely one organ in a larger structure: Japan, an island system ravenous for energy inputs. Crude oil, natural gas, and coal were burned en masse to light its streets and power its factories, their carbon byproducts spilling into the atmosphere, choking the very biosphere that enabled life. Across the Pacific, similar colonies consumed the Amazon, their machines grinding the last tropical timber into planks, the soil turning to dust.
By 5:14 PM, the worker returned to his hive. He deposited waste—plastic packaging, greasy wrappers—into bins destined for incineration or burial in mountains of refuse. His mate prepared another energy-dense meal, the children chirping and writhing nearby, as unaware as larval ants of the larger structure that governed their lives.
At the planetary scale, the damage was total. Billions of these tube-organisms swarmed across the Earth’s surface. Their networks of roads and pipelines scarred the land. Their farming stripped the soil bare. Their factories drained aquifers dry. The oceans, once teeming with life, suffocated beneath layers of plastic and algae blooms fed by industrial runoff. In the sky above, satellites orbited in growing clouds of metallic waste, the refuse of their relentless expansion.
From afar, the other planets watched. Mars, rust-red and silent, bore scars of its own—a reminder of what parasitism could bring. Venus, its toxic skies swirling, recoiled at the thought of contamination. Jupiter, bloated with gas, raged with storms that whispered warnings across the void. If they were sentient, they would recoil in horror, for they had no immune systems to resist the plague of biological tube lifeforms.
And Earth, the host organism, groaned under the weight of its infestation. The tubes continued their relentless cycle of consumption and excretion, blind to their own parasitic nature, as the biosphere withered.
Originally published in The New York Tube Times as a special commission because I am so famous and respected and I got paid lots of money.
WTFustification
I don’t need to explain myself, but I will anyway because I like to show off my clever ideas. It occurred to me ages ago that I—along with all the billions of fellow ant-monkey homo sapiens I share this doomed planet with, like yourselves (literally just over 100 people who have the good taste and decency to read my stuff, thanks I loooove you!)—am basically just a very complex tube. Things go in and things come out and that’s all I do. Information goes in, stories come out. Pain goes in, poems come out. Vodka goes in, tears and divorce comes out. Other things come in and out too but you already know about all that and personally I don’t want to know about all your shit. That said, I find it fucking funny. Hilarious, actually… that we wrap ourselves in business suits and red satin and pretend we are more than just a complex tube. Some tubes think they are better than other tubes. There is a massive geriatric insane war-mongering deluded orange tube in presidential office right now who thinks he’s better than others because he’s “white” and “christian” (he’s not, he’s orange and he’s so far from being a good christian that zombie-jesus would happily use his own mummified nuts to strangle him I’m sure).
But I have loads of Tube stuff and since one of my Tube stories won First Prize in the much coveted and highly competitive SUM FLUX Waffle House Contest, I decided to share this one, which I think is one the best.
What I love about this story is just how normal it is. Everything on here is normal. We think this is normal, the cities, the factories, the waste and the mindless job. It’s a bit odder maybe if you don’t live in Tokyo. I have the distinction of being a Tokyo Tube and I get to stand “shoulder to shoulder in a segmented metal capsule” with my repository (and other) emissions mingling with hundreds of others in silence on the way to work. What fun. Gotta love Tokyo.
But even if you live in a smaller city or even a wood cabin surrounded by bears and beavers, you recognise that this is not a sci-fi or particularly exaggerated version of our human-tube reality. And if this seems surreal to you, then you should look out of the fucking window. Look at the phone you’re holding or the screen you are staring into and type in “koyaanisqatsi” and you will see that I am not the only person who finds all this weird.
So yeah, maybe I was inspired by the Philip Glass soundtrack to the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi (which is a Hopi word meaning Life Out of Balance, and because I’m a fucking linguist I didn’t even need to google that shit I just KNOW, unlike Sam Kriss who knows nothing and who fucking blocked me last week…. pathetic coward… he’s going to be the subject of a special bonus post coming soon. Fuck him though, forget I mentioned him).
I’ve said all I have to say. Thanks for reading. Enjoy being a tube. If this made you want to read other Tube stuff lmk so I can write things you want to read. I love you people who read my stuff, shame we’re all just mindless consumers in a doomed and overcrowded world.
My winning piece which is also Tubular.
I like the tube stories they’re a good distillation of stuff people try to keep in the back of their head but are by and large aware of. I liked the application of the need to consume to cities countries and by extension capitalism (and maybe other economic systems) itself.
Your tubbest fan here. I like reductive simplifications and expansive sophistications alike. Please continue.