Monkey Business

I have to say that this made me laugh.  Much of it was really clever, really skewed, and delightfully....wrong.  The, ahem, payoff in the basement was certainly unexpected. I really liked the asides about freshman commitment and the whole section about how a mechanical engineer should be moved to go study something metallic. I liked that mix of dry and absurd.

I didn't care for the heavy reliance on the onomatopoeia.  Your descriptions are stronger than the sound effects, in my opinion. If you save one or two and use them judiciously, you'll achieve a stronger effect overall. 

Ultimately, I gave it a thumbs down because I didn't really think it fit the assignment, so to speak.  While not ideal, this just didn't speak of dystopia to me. Messed up, for sure, but not the kind of ideas I would associate with the form. It could be that with a little tweaking that part would be clarified. 

It looks as if you had fun with this, whatever the outcome. 

Sorry Jeff, this didn't really work for me. It fails to meet the criteria of the contest for one. Second, while you have a little bit of humor in there, the story doesn't really move. [spoiler alert] Once we get beyond the fact that mechanical monkeys shoot porn in the library subbasement, there's nothing left of the story, and it takes us far too long to get there. I found the story tiresome to be honest.

Some stories you know what you're getting into right away.

Not this one! Wowsers.

This story is easy to read, so kudos there. I think it takes a little too long to get to the basement, but that's pretty easy to fix.

My only real problem is that you don't really do anything with your unique idea. You get us to the basement, reveal your secret, and then....Mark leaves. The End. If you think about it, there's no reason Mark needs to be in this story at all, since he doesn't do anything except discover what is going on. There's no consequences to his life. What's going on in the basement needs to affect his life. Having an end that meshed with your conflict would justify what you showed us in the basement. As written, it seems like a joke where the punchline comes several minutes before the end of the joke.

Fix the end. Make it mean something, and you're onto something here.

Ok .... Ok .... that was bizarre to say the least.  Once I made it past the opening scene in the library, I'm sure a look of mildly shocked confusion never left my face.  Did I mention bizarre?  I can see this happening as some sort of strange dream brought on by too much caffeine and studying metallurgy.  Unfortunately, that doesn't quite meet up with the challenges criteria.  (Dystopia/Utopia?)

Still, I think you could turn this into an interesting story that reads much smoother with a few more editing cycles.  Good Luck and Keep at it!

I couldn't help but read this with a big grin on my face, it's a hugely fun read.  Sure there are issues here - the onomatopoeia, it doesn't fit the contest guidelines, the lack of overall story - but I honestly couldn't care less about that simply because it made me smile.  I particularly liked the line - "He wasn’t certain if his inability to look away made him a really good engineering student or just into bestiality".