More Urban Legends of the Future
Roomba Rescue
 
First told in 2006 by the cousin of a friend of the woman this happened to.
 
So this woman, in her mid thirties, she lived alone in a one bedroom apartment with a couple of cats.  She liked to keep the place tidy, but hated sweeping three times a week to keep the cat hair down.  So she decided to buy herself one of those little robotic vacuum cleaners… a Roomba.  I don’t know if you’ve seen one of these things, it kinda looks like a hubcap and rolls around the floor.
 
Anyway, the Roomba was cleaning the floor one day and the woman decided she’d use all her free time to make herself a nice meal.  She cooked up a steak for herself and sat down to eat.  Now while she’s eating, a fine, juicy piece of steak went down the wrong way.  She coughed, trying to dislodge it, but with every breath she felt it sliding deeper into her windpipe.  She stood, her mind green with panic.  The steak stuck in her throat, no air getting past at all.  She tried giving herself the Heimlich, but to no avail.  Her vision darkening, she stumbled toward the phone, hoping to dial 911 in time to save herself.  Blackness engulfed her and she fell to the floor, her hand still grasping toward salvation.
 
The woman woke up a few hours later.  She was breathing normally.  The world was dark and she felt something hard and heavy with little pointy bits resting on her face.  She smelled dust and new plastic.  She raised her hands and found her Roomba balanced on top of her face, its vacuum positioned directly over her gaping mouth.  When she checked inside the Roomba later, she found a cat-hair-coated piece of steak in its particle bin.
 
The Girl in the Fog
 
First told in 2057 by this one kid in gym class who knew a guy who lived near there.
 
Ever since global warming happened and the sea levels rose, there’s been a lot more fog in the Seattle Archipelago.  On an average day, you can hardly see from Queen Anne Island to Capitol Island, let alone First Island. 
 
One day, this 13 year old girl was walking home from school along the shoreline.  It was a cold, lonely place filled with brambles and the tumbled remains of houses that had partially fallen into the Puget Sound.  Of course, her parents had told her countless times not to play there, but she liked it because of the solitude and the occasional treasure left there by residents who had abandoned the area decades before. 
 
As she walked along the glass beach, kicking an old soda can, the fog rolled in.  The fog leapt off of the water, rolling across the land, engulfing the girl and everything around her like a grey blanket, like porridge, like wet cement.  The girl could see nothing, not even her hand in front of her face.  She could no longer hear the waves lapping at the shore.  Even her own voice was devoured by the fog.  She wandered, her hands spread in front of her, falling over broken furniture and cutting her knees on exposed rebar.  For hours, she walked, calling for help.  None came.  Days passed… and then weeks and then months.  She wandered in the fog, exhausted, cold and afraid. 
 
They say that whenever that fog rolls into the Archipelago, the girl is still trapped inside of it.  She wanders there, calling for help, growing colder, growing lonelier with each passing year.  If you’re ever lost in that fog on that beach and she finds you, she’ll take you with her into that blankness to ease her grief. 

- posted by Katherine @ 3:52 PM