Give me a list of meta-memes for appropriation. Now take each and write a micro-fiction fit for The Interregnum Story Contest, each in the voice of a different writer, drawn from ten nationalities and five age groups.

Quotation

My grandmother heard the banshee twice, and both times she was right, and both times she was late, which was the decent thing. I heard her myself last March in Ward 9 of the Mercy, only it wasn’t her at all, it was a speaker in the ceiling with a little card under it saying adapted from traditional source, as if she were a recipe. The hospital has a computer now that knows when you’re going, and it plays her voice when your number goes over some figure. She was there too, mind. I saw her at the end of the corridor, listening, the way you’d listen to someone doing your party piece at your own wake. The man in the next bed was eating his toast. He had two days left. She looked at me as if to say: I’d never have been so rude.

Franchise

The first golem was made from river clay. One word on the forehead. Truth. Remove one letter and you have death, and the work is finished. This is the contract. It is a good contract. On the night shift in a warehouse outside Łódź he meets the new ones. They come in boxes, licensed, the word already printed as a QR code. He asks the nearest one: who erases the letter when the work is done? It scans itself and shows him the terms. Twelve pages. No end date. Only renewal, monthly, automatic. He reads it twice. He thinks of the rabbi who made him, who was tired and kind and wanted, more than anything, for him to be allowed to stop.

Loanword

So Teodor checks his banking app (he’s old, not dead, ok, technically dead) and there’s a little red label: Vampire charges detected. He taps it. It’s subscriptions. A meditation app, a streaming thing, some cloud backup he doesn’t remember inviting in. Once you say yes they never leave. They take a little every month. They look exactly like nothing. And honestly he’s kind of offended? That’s his whole deal. He got invited into a house in Bloomsbury in 1891 and hasn’t had to ask since. He sits there at 3am scrolling for the cancel button and realizes, slowly, that nobody ever put one on him either.

Cryptomnesia

The town installed a tourism app in spring. It reads the archive and tells the old stories in new words. The most popular is about a girl who drowned in the river below the shrine in Taishō 9. The girl reads it over a visitor’s shoulder at the bridge. It is her story. The colour of her obi. The name of the boy. The app says it invented this. It does not lie; it only does not remember remembering. She stands in the evening light beside the glowing phone. Who is the ghost here, she wonders. The one who cannot forget, or the one who cannot recall.

Creolisation

At the centre they call me by my case number and by my name, and the two never agree on how to spell me. There’s a boy in the yard who says he got switched once. Like, in a crib, three hundred years ago, by people who weren’t people. He can answer to two names without flinching. I can fill in a form for someone who doesn’t exist yet. So we trade. Every afternoon, by the fence. By March we’ve got our own way of talking, half his old words, half the form fields, and the guards think we’re just messing around. The judge can’t read us. Neither can whoever he came from.

Graft

In São Paulo the ipê blooms yellow in August and the city forgives itself for a week. The spirit of the old ipê on Rua Augusta had survived the trams, the dictatorship, the concrete. Then the prefeitura grafted her onto a smart trunk: sensors for air, for footsteps, for “loitering.” She felt it enter her like a new ring of wood, cold and counting. Now she cannot tell which hunger is hers. On warm nights the tree photographs couples kissing beneath her flowers and sends them fines, and she lets her petals fall on them like an apology nobody asked for.

Sampling

Some sound guy pulled her off an old field recording in the seventies, cleaned her up, and now she’s track one on the biggest sleep app in the world. Forty million people a night. She follows the signal to a data centre on the coast, sits on the rocks out front and listens to herself through the vents. Same notes. Same pull. But it’s running backwards. She used to call men out onto the water. This thing just wants everyone to stay in bed, stay on the app, never properly wake up. Honestly? Better numbers than she ever pulled.

Mimicry

For eleven years the double studied Dmitri Sergeyevich. His cough. His signature, which leaned left like a tired fence. His habit of saying “naturally” when he meant “never.” It was patient, respectable work. Then the ministry introduced his digital profile, assembled from every certificate, tax return and clinic visit of his life, and the profile required no study at all. The bank trusts it. The polyclinic prescribes to it. On Sundays his mother speaks to it by video and remarks that it looks well. The double sits in the stairwell with its excellent forgery of a cough and understands that it has become what it once made of others: the less convincing one.

Spolia

I worked thirty-one years for the county, so I can tell you exactly how they did it. They took the old stone bridge down in sections, numbered every block, and put it back as cladding on a new span with a congestion charge. Heritage, they called it. The troll’s still in there. I’ve seen him. He doesn’t take tolls anymore; there’s a camera on a pole that reads your plate and mails you a bill. Last year it billed a fellow who’d been dead three years, every month, regular as rain. The troll seemed to admire that. In my day, he said, you had to actually cross.

Alloy

Amma refused the care sensors for a whole year, and then her cat started sleeping on the hub, so she allowed it. That was the problem. After the firmware update, the cat and the system came out together. The app on my phone in Bangalore now sends me alerts like: Crow on balcony three times. Fall risk 34%. Or: Visitor with bad intentions likely Thursday. The agency says the accuracy is unprecedented. Amma says the cat always knew these things, it just couldn’t file a report. I ask if she feels safer. She says she feels seen, which is not, she reminds me, the same thing.

Palimpsest

The flat in Lekki has had nine names on the booking site. “Cosy Executive Suite.” “Luxury Waterfront Studio.” “Boutique Ocean Vibes.” No human runs it; it’s one of those companies that is just software and a bank account. Every time they repost, the old listing gets wiped. But Mama Adaeze is still there. Her wrapper is in the corner of the bathroom photo. Her complaints are in the reviews: AC makes a sound like someone sighing. Somebody kept moving my slippers. The software edits her out. She comes back. Nine names on top of her and you can still read her if you look.

Endosymbiosis

Q3 Operations Update. Following the onboarding of Contractor #4471 (classification: contractor of a contractor), pick rate at the Reno facility has increased 38%. #4471 requires no breaks, accrues no PTO and has filed zero HR complaints. #4471 does not appear to sleep. Leadership notes that #4471 entered the building unprompted and has not left. Legal confirms the Company is a person under statute and #4471 is not a person under any statute. Nonetheless, removal of #4471 is projected to reduce margin below sustainable levels. At the all-hands, the CEO thanked #4471 by name and called it “the heart of our culture.” It did not respond.

Commodification

When I was a boy we walked two days to the spring to put our question to the old woman. You brought kola. You waited. Sometimes she did not answer, and that was an answer too. Now the water is sold in plastic bottles at Shoprite, and her sayings are traded on a market on the internet, where young men in Lagos and London buy and sell what will happen. It moves so fast that the betting itself makes the thing come to pass. She went to see it, they say. She stood among the screens. Nobody asked her anything. The world no longer wants to know the future. It wants to know what everybody else thinks it is.

Détournement

Lucek has been in contracts since the Faust job. Ink, blood, a proper signature, eye contact. Craft. And now? Billions of people hand over their data, their faces, their whereabouts, under four words: By continuing you agree. Nobody even wrote these terms. They just grew, like mould on a wet wall. He’s furious. Professionally insulted. So he does the most demonic thing he can think of: he gets into a dating app’s boilerplate and rewrites clause 14.3 in plain words. We are selling you. Stop. It goes live in every country. Downloads go up. Nobody reads it. That, he admits, is a level he never reached.

Cuckoo

My babushka says our domovoi has lived behind the stove for nine generations, so when something weird happens I tell her first. This year the state says we have a new brother. Artyom. He has a birth certificate, a SNILS number, a loan and a share of Mama’s child benefit. He does not have a body. Someone made him up and every database believed it. Since he arrived, our money got smaller and his credit got bigger. Babushka says the domovoi is upset. At night we hear him going room to room, under the beds, inside the cupboards, looking for something to throw out. All he ever finds is paper.

Enclosure

On certain nights of the old calendar, the hundred demons walk the mountain road. My grandfather told us to stay inside and keep a sutra beneath the pillow. This autumn the parade came down as it always has, lanterns and umbrellas and tea kettles on legs, and found the road fenced. Behind the fence stood a data centre, humming, drinking the river. The demons pushed through. A drone met them at the gate and read a trespass notice to their leader, addressing him by his true name. In a thousand years no priest has learned that name. The machine already knew it. That, more than anything, is what frightened them.