multi-vibrate cellphones. It would vibrate up and down for incoming phone calls, left and right for texts. It turns out that you can’t tell the difference in your pocket, but the important thing is that it was an edge, it was cutting something, and I was on it.

Since then, I’ve felt it my duty to myself and those around me to keep on top of these sorts of things. I bought the first squeezable cellphone in 2011, back when having a phone that grew and stretched under your hand like a sleek plastic kitten with a touchscreen was still a novelty.

When the Megapede Clingphone came out in 2013, with its thousand tiny, clawed feet and segmented carapace, I bought one — and kept it even after the panicked recall. (And, I might add, it never climbed down my throat in my sleep.)

I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that I know what I’m talking about when I tell you the Avocalis Ellison is the future. You’ve seen the ads: “The First Phone With a Rudimentary Heart and Lungs,” so on and so forth, but that doesn’t tell you enough. They don’t even know how to advertise it, that’s how revolutionary it is.

Remember when you first got a TiVo and tried to explain it to your friends and they were all, “So, it’s a VCR? Without tapes?” That’s the sort of look I get when I explain that my new phone is an organism. They think I bought it to be a pet or something; they don’t realize this is a powerful business device, one that just happens to eat baby mice.

Look, here it is.

Right, the smell, everyone notices the smell first. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That smell means I’m on a 5G-alpha network, and the intensity indicates that I have what in your terms would be about three bars of connectivity. If I were connected to a WiMax network it would smell … it’s hard to explain …

Muskier. Less loamy.

Ah, perfect, I’m getting a call. I have it on silent, or you would hear a kind of keening. It doesn’t have custom ringtones — or keentones, whatever — but those are coming as soon as they work out whether the sound counts as a live performance. I have it set so that when my sister calls, it kind of stretches out and flops over like that. When it’s my boss calling, it shudders in a sort of growing shiver from its headphone port down to its excretory chamber.

Yeah, lots of people say that. I guess it’s hard to look at if you’re not used to it, but the point is that you don’t look at it, you feel it. In your pocket. And it’s amazingly easy to tell the difference between a stretchy flop and a shivery shudder when it’s in your pocket. One time, I put it in my jacket pocket and hung it up without thinking, and even from across the room I could tell my mom was calling by the way one corner of my jacket was undulating in a desperate flutter, like a wounded blue jay.

Oh, and the best part, it’s almost impossible to lose this phone, because it crawls toward the smell of blood. I have a small container of pig’s blood in my fridge, and if I can’t find the phone, I set out a bowl of it and come back in a couple hours to find it sitting in there like a dumpling. It’s amazing.

The point is that you’re looking at, and smelling, the future. That’s the future you’re wiping off your fingers. Already the competitors are coming out with something similar, but with hands-free stereo tendrils, so I guess as much as I love this phone it’ll probably end up at the back of a drawer like the others.

I’d sell it on Craigslist, but I don’t know, I always find Craigslist people to be kind of creepy.

- – -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a zookeeper, a beekeeper and a timekeeper.

See Also:

• Alt Text: 'Supertaskers' and Other Cellphone Oddities
• Alt Text: Wilderness Survival, iPhone-Style
• Alt Text: Brilliant Plans to Rescue Dying Industries

Authors: Lore Sjöberg

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