A little bad taste...

Bob approached the Quipping Room with more than a little trepidation.  Even as he turned the corner at the end of the corridor, still five doors and nearly eighty-five feet from his target, he felt sweat spring out on his forehead and the backs of his arms.  He swallowed firmly, and made himself keep moving.  His eyes darted from side to side, hunting for anything out of the ordinary.  The corridor was empty apart from himself; the walls were a lemon yellow chosen for its calming effects on the human mind, and the carpet was an inoffensive dark green.  The doors were veneered with a nutty brown layer that felt slightly plasticky to the touch.  He realised suddenly that he was itemising everything he saw to avoid having to think about what he was having to do.  He straightened up, and wondered when he'd started slouching – no, cringing would be a better descriptor – and tried hard to concentrate on what he was doing.
MSPARKER's room had a little white sign on the outside of the door that simply stated Quipping Room.  He lifted his hand to knock, and then lowered it again, feeling slightly silly.  He wiped his palms on the front of his jeans, and then pushed the door open quickly.
The room was empty apart from the keyboard and screen that interfaced to the quipping machine.  He felt let-down, and realised he'd been hoping that someone else was using it.  Lots of people around the university seemed to talk about MSPARKER, but he'd not yet found anyone else actually using her.  Even Dr. Malmstein seemed happier to instruct Bob to do things than to actually come in here and do them himself.
There was a blue-upholstered swivel chair in front of the desk, so he sat down, heaved a sigh, and typed his username and password on the keyboard.
<Hello Bob> appeared on the screen.  <How shall we take over the world tonight?>
He looked at the screen for several seconds, telling himself that the engine behind it simply picked words and phrases out of a large database, and that sometimes they would seem more apposite than others.  MSPARKER didn't truly think, it solved specific problems in the style of a long dead author, and was really just a glorified expert system.  Hell, calling it MSPARKER surely indicated that it was just a vanity project.
MSPARKER, he typed back, We have a man in the Common Room
<Tell me more.  It's not like I'm fucking busy> appeared on the screen while he was trying to decide how to continue.  <Or vice versa.>
Bob's jaw actually dropped open at this point and he read and re-read the lines on the screen a few times before he understood that they actually were there.  He stared, and finally shook his head, and re-read his own statement, determined to continue.
He has some skulls with him and he claims that he dug them up like that
<A graverobber then.  Perhaps he'd like to jump my bones?>
There are houses built into the skulls, little houses with little mortared bricks and some glazed windows and gardens and everything!
<An industrious graverobber with  his own opinions on what should be in Good Homes and Gardens?>
Pause and stare again.  Whoever had done this was good, MSPARKER seemed more and more real every time he talked to her.  Typed on her.  Whatever the damn verb should be to describe their communications.
I think he's a fraud.
<A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.>
Bob sat back, feeling cold sweat run down the back of his neck.  He ran his hand through his hair and it came away wet, so he wiped it on the front of his jeans again.  That was a good answer to give to Dr. Malmstein, he thought.  It sounded like it came from a machine, and it was easy to interpret how you wanted to.  He could certainly claim that he thought it meant that even MSPARKER considered the claim dubious.
He leant forwards again and tapped the PrintScreen button, and then stood up and left, entirely happily.  The printouts came out in the next office, the print-hub for this floor of the building.  There were several people in there, some standing around waiting for long printouts, and some just standing around and chatting to their friends.  For the first time since he left the Common Room Bob relaxed a little.
"Hey, whose is this?"  A voice, a young woman waving a sheet of paper and sounding annoyed.  "How did you schedule it into the middle of my job?"
Bob looked up, suddenly worried.
"What is it?" asked another voice, an older man, probably the print technician who managed the hub.
"Weird," said the woman.  "At the top it says 'A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika'" – Bob noted that she said paprika wrong – "and then there several paragraphs about something called a memento mori and a drawing of some kind of insect."
"That's mine," said Bob, his chest feeling hollow and the pit of stomach cold.  "I'm sorry, I don't know how it interrupted your printout."
"You're the guy who uses MSPARKER," said the older man looking at him.  "That machine's got some odd functions, you know."
"I know," said Bob, holding his hand out for the page, now desperate to leave.
"It's probably not his fault," said the older man.  "God knows why that machine has all the privileges it does."
The young woman snorted and let Bob take the page from her hand.  "My printout had better not be interrupted any more," she said impatiently.  Bob slipped out of the room, afraid to look at the printout with people around him, and wondered as he did what MSPARKER had decided to tell him now.

Hallowe'en house

The faculty of Epistemological Eschatology had gathered together in the Common Room to look at the perspex display cases and what they contained.  As the faculty, on a good day, numbered only four people, there was no pushing or shoving, no peering over each others shoulders or standing on tiptoes, and very little in the way of awed conversation or startled comments.  Dr. Malmstein was tapping a pipe (that he never smoked) against his teeth, and Bob was wondering if it would be rude to sit down and stop gawking at the display cases.
"We were hoping you might have some insights," said a man of medium height.  He was wearing overalls and clutching a grey checkered flat cap in his hands.  There was a small amount of dried mud on his boots, and a faintly smoky smell about him.  His hair was sandy-coloured and just starting to turn grey at the fringe, and he looked earthy.  Bob thought he was highly suspicious.
"Well," said Dr. Malmstein, the pipe clinking gently against his teeth and muffling his voice, "I would say that you've got some skulls here.  Human by the looks of things.  You might want to check with the local council about the legitimacy of you keeping them you know."
"Yes, but what about what's been done with 'em?" said the man, his accent uniform across his words, not too thick to be hard to understand, but always there like it was important to him that you knew he had an accent.
"You mean the houses?"  Dr. Malmstein raised both eyebrows, one after the other like some bizarre mexican wave performed in miniature across his face.  The man nodded, and Bob decided at that moment that this was definitely a put-up job.
The tops of the skulls had been broken open and little houses, complete with gardens, had been constructed in the brain pan.  Tiny bricks had been mortared together painstakingly, and each house had at least three storeys.  One of the three even had flying buttresses and a little tower.  The windows were mostly left open, but a couple had been glazed, and trees that were smaller even than bonzai were dotted all over the otherwise grassy and mossy gardens.  They were beautiful, elaborate constructions, almost certain a work of art, and yet here was this man trying too hard to be the salt of the earth, claiming that he'd just found them when digging things up and that they might actually be genuine.
"The houses are beautiful," said Dr. Malmstein thoughtfully.  "The artist should probably exhibit them somewhere where they'd get more attention."
"There's no artist," said the man with the cap, looking scandalised.  "There's just me.  I dug them up, and I'd like some reassurance from you clever types that my skull's not going to be next!"
"There would surely be some small difficulty in extracting it," murmured Dr. Malmstein, but quietly enough that only Bob heard him.  "Well, Mr. Phelps, I'll have my assistant query the quipping machine about it, and we'll see if that can offer better advice.  It's a true wonder of modern technology, you know."
Bob flinched.  He'd been avoiding MSPARKER, the university's quipping machine ever since she'd sent him a list of doomsday scenarios.
"I'm not sure that's a good use of university fun–" he managed before Dr. Malmstein caught his gaze and silenced him.
"It is," he said firmly.  "Ask MSPARKER what the point of the skulls might be."
"And what the houses are for," said the man quickly.  He looked slightly more shifty when he smiled.
"Oh fine," said Bob, his voice betraying his irritation.  "Give me twenty minutes to check she's awake."