The machine rattled and whined and spat out a fresh box, assembled from rearranged molecules of particulate matter fed in through the back. Gleeson picked it up and handed it to the supplicant before her.

“Here,” she said. “Remember, the cigarettes are filled with iyodemecin and they’re poisonous. The meat has soap throughout it, and you’ll vomit if you try to eat it. The chocolate, butter, and vitamins are edible, though don’t try to use the silverware as it’ll start rusting the second you open the package and expose it to the air.”

Some of the supplicants would ask why that was, why a device that could rearrange matter was so inefficient that they could eat less than half of the ration box that had been enough to sustain a person for two days within living memory. This poor emaciated thing, though, was so grateful to have any sustenance at all that they only nodded and smiled. Gleeson was sure, from the look in their eyes, that they’d be emptying their stomach on the roadside soon enough after ignoring her advice about the inedible meat. The local cemetery was full of people who, desperate for tobacco, had smoked the iyodemecin-laced cigarettes.

The fact was, there were none left who knew how to adjust the great machines to arrest their slow decline into dysfunction, gradually introducing flaws and errors into what they made until they were all but useless. And there were none who knew any other way of obtaining food, for it had been generations since anyone had obtained it any other way.

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