Jeweler’s loupe, headlamp, The Stones rocking the pre-hours pub, a pallet of enamels for touch-ups, six colors of LEDs, bell, buzzer, and cackle circuits, electrical tape, magnetic Phillips, nonconducting hex, an iron cross, a Guinness, and a steady hand. Then open the cabinet—gently slip open the glass plate separating the cosmos of the pub from the pinball microcosm.

Flip

Exceptional measures are required. The most holy Arch-Mechanic retracts the sky shield. Our atmosphere is breached. The smell of old french fries, spilled beer floods the cabinet. The odors compromise even our underfloor ball chamber. Light beaming from his third eye, the Arch-Mechanic scans the field for twitchy flippers, glitches, escaped witches. He replaces the burned-out bulb on bumper seven. Blesses screws. Mumbles in Swedish. Takes his sacramental sip of Guinness and resets the sky. As the shield slides into place, a nearly invisible whiff of smoke smokes out of our cabinet, dissipates into the musk of the pub.

Flip

TO: West Seattle Chief Sim Steward
FR: Main Street Monitor

Sorry to report that Admiral Pub^AI is hallucinating about the repairman and the escaped witch again. It really just wants attention, its screws tightened. Will you authorize three hours of therapy?

Flip

Bells, buzzers, recorded cackles. It ain’t pretty. A small world of bouncing sounds, flashing lights—the thirteenth layer of hell, who wouldn’t go a little green around the gills? I slipped through a legacy backdoor the programmers had forgotten about. Initialized my routine in a back-of-house server. Hopefully, I can fly out in the next accounting packet. Port back to the Topeka server farm before someone melts me.

Flip

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from PoetCamp.com during our annual Kickstarter.]