Posted by Emily on June 23, 2004 at 19:51:16:
If you take 2 measures of Arthur C Clark, shake them well, sprinkle some Isaac Azimov on top , dissolve them slowly in too much lager beer and pour the whole mixture in a big bowel of sick delusions and expired nonsense, all while letting “The brandenburg symphony” play in the background, then drink it, puke it all later over a piece of paper, type the result on your PC and post it here, you’d probably end up with something almost as silly as this.
Anyway, its a short story (quite a long one actually), and its ON TOPIC (whatever that might be) , and I do hope (against all possible odds) that you’d enjoy it.
The Dumbaphoon Experiment
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1-The lost tribe
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Abnurman Waggle Boodle was a great man . . at least most of his people thought so.
Numerically, what his people thought didn’t really count.For after all, his so called “tribe” were just a bunch of 60 or 70 persons at the most, half of them were lunatics already from lack of sleep, the rest were -among several other problems-dying from hunger.
They were primitive, naive and very exhausted people who believed the world was the place where The Great Evil God of white death have chosen -for some utterly twisted divine reason- to shit all over. They were busy all day searching for something to eat among piles of “God’s white shit” - or simply “snow” as we call it - which was incessantly falling everywhere all the time, covering the world with a boring shade of white that made life so ridiculously difficult.
Abnurman’s people didn’t have much of a spiritual side to their lives, they were too busy with the impossible task of feeding themselves, and making sure they wont be fed upon by other even nastier and more desperate creatures that they really had no time thinking of any thing not directly related to survival like “culture” or ”spirituality” or any such kooky stuff . The closest thing they had to a philosophy or a religion was the all time puzzling three questions of why? when? and how? Why all that snow? When the hell would this divine diarrhea stop? and how big exactly could The Great Evil God ’s holly ass be?
They also believed that if the time comes and things got real shitty, they would all be saved by a black box.
The reason why Abnurman Waggle Boodle have became their leader had nothing to do with him being The tallest, smartest, and most sexually able member in the tribe, for he possessed none of such qualities so deserving of leadership in primitive communities. In fact he was a dull, sheepish and all in all a sorry looking male specimen who -in any sort of comparison with almost any other male specimen- seemed to be an inch or two shorter than average.
But his father , the late Za-Buho Waggle Boodle, had been the leader of the tribe , Abnurman was Za-Buho’s eldest son, and to his people that was a reason good enough to accept him as their leader, which was in turn a reason good enough to regard him as a great man.
The only privilege Abnurman gained from being his people’s leader was the lifetime custody of the enigmatic world saving black box . He would carry it around all the time and guard it with his life.That’s what his dad told him to do.
His late dad told him lots of other things that similarly didn’t make sense, but he believed in them anyway. He told him about how the world was once a wonderful place where people lived in tall magical towers where light and dark, or hot and cold could all be switched at will by a finger’s touch. He told him that at that time food was not a problem at all, and that it was kept in abundance of exotic shapes and forms in large enchanted white boxes in every house. He even told him that each of the ancient time houses had a mystic window through which every man and woman could watch and listen to the horribly devastating things that were happening to other men and women who lived elsewhere.
But most important of all, he told him about the argument that went on between good people and bad people. His father told him that the good people were far nicer than the bad people. Bad People were a dirty bunch of sick eluded individuals who -because they were real silly-argued that they were righteous and had faith and morals. The good people were much better, for they were really righteous, they really had faith and morals and dabombs. His father explained that dabombs were things you could through at bad people to make them good . As for faith and morals, they were such ambiguous terms that no matter how elaborately his father tried to explain them they still didn’t make any sense.
Abnurman was told since early childhood that the argument between the good and the bad people got heated, due to the fact that the bad people didn’t really want to believe they were that bad, so the good people had to go such a long way to convince them of it, which included beating the living shit out of them to clarify that issue . . a process that somehow escalated into lots of mutual misunderstanding, violence, global market imbalance, and what his dad called the “No-Clear Wars” . . a conflict so damn messy and noisy which woke up the great snow shiting God and got him real pissed off.
His dad told him about how a few good people were chosen to hide in a big underground hole where they survived for a few years until they got too claustrophobic to manage things the right way and ended up arguing again among themselves , especially about sex related issues. That ended up in lots of broken necks, explosions, and the evacuation of the very few who were left alive, carrying their valuable black boxes with them.
According to his dad’s story, there were several thousands of those boxes at that time , yet only 10 were saved from the underground hole massacre, and even most of these were either destroyed or lost during the tribe’s long march towards the south in their escape from God’s white curse .
His dad assured him that the boxes contained “secrets of the ancients that should be kept safe”, and that it was the tribe’s leader’s main task to guard the single box that remained, for somehow it was to “aid them during the bad days, and help them regain their former glory when the right time comes”.
Abnurman took the box out of his pocket and looked at it, he wondered what it was waiting for to save them! for it seemed that things couldn’t get worse than what they were already and that if there was a right time for the box to start acting it was right at that moment. After all the endless journey southward was not helping, for it seemed the south was becoming as lethally frozen as the north, and the snow was creeping upon them from all geographical directions, there was no escape.
He attempted to open the box but it was locked in the ancients’ fashion. He thought about breaking it open, yet he was too scared that such act might bring another curse and everyone was having enough of that already. He tried to talk to the holly box, explain the situation to it, but that brought the normal kind of response any self respecting box would make. He shook it , rubbed it, patted it, and finally slept on the snow in front of it, looking at it desperately, waiting for it to do whatever trick it was supposed to do until he, and all of his tribe - who were all what’s left from humanity- died from cold the next morning.
Centuries later the sun shone again, melting the ice and causing the bodies preserved in it to rot.
Finally, when the aliens arrived, it was too late.
2-The Aliens
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Bogwitz - the triple headed five armed alien anthropologist - entered the meeting room, apologized to his colleagues for arriving late, rubbed his cubic balls with three of his cylindrical hands, banged his heads twice against the hard metal of the meeting table, and farted , which was a polite gesture meant to invite everyone to get seated so that the meeting could start.
“Gentle beings” said the Alien Scientist addressing the alien audience “greatest intellects from all over our ever glorious Dumbaphoon empire. Its both an honor and a privilege to be with you tonight” he added, unable to hide the excitement evident in his tone of voice and the frantic movement of his 17 inch cephalodick, which was wagging happily from the top of his middle head.
“The subject of our meeting as you have been briefed, is our latest breath taking discovery concerning the enigmatic ho-man race. The race that had once lived on the previously thought to be uninhabitable and tastelessly blue Planet Earth.”
The audience fell into deep silence, interrupted only by the several excited sluggish hums that came from a number of bodily sources too gross to mention.
“Soon after our first landing on planet earth, we found out that all life forms have ceased to exist upon its surface some 3000 years before our arrival, due reasons we were unable to comprehend ”
Behind him, a wall sized monitor lit up, showing a documentary of the first Dumbaphoon scout spaceship entering the earth’s atmosphere.
The audience watched with silent curiosity.
“For countless years we have been mystified by that mysterious civilization that seemed to have thrived upon the face of that planet, and all the same frustrated by the very little archeological findings we’ve been able to gather . . All we had found -until recently- were few scattered fragments from rusty old ho-man devices, enough to let us know that Ho-mans knew much, but exactly how much? how did they live and think? why all organic life forms had suddenly vanished ? we didn’t have a clue, that’s until last week”
The alien anthropologist stopped for a moment to gather his breath ,a process that filled the room with yet another mixture of unbearable smells.
He continued.
“From the few incomplete fossil skeletons we found, the very scarce documents we managed to gather, and through the devoted efforts of you gentlemen , we’ve been able to know how did ho-mans look like, we’ve even been able to find out the meaning of a few popular terms Ho-mans used. We know, with a good deal of certainty , that a “Bitch” was a very tall female ho-man, and that that a “Basketballplayer” was a dark skinned male who was apt to be a “son of a bitch”. Subtle theories are now being developed about their Prophet “Mary” who might have been also called “Christ-mas”, and the mystique superior power the whole planet happened to believe in , the “Hoooly-Shit”.
Upon mentioning this, a round green piggish creature who sat among the audience, and who made those discoveries, smiled modestly at the rest of the group who were enthusiastically spitting at him, which was the Dumbaphoon’s alternative for clapping .
The Alien anthropologist farted once more to regain the attention of the audience and continued:
“Yet, and by coincidence alone, all those great discoveries about ho-mans is dwarfed in comparison by what we found last weak.”
The audience licked their eyes with their tongues in anticipation. Excited hums and whispers and bursts of cyanide gas filled the room as the image of a small black box occupied the large monitor.
“This, dear gentlebeings, is a box” said the alien anthropologist proudly as his cephalodick pointed at the image on the monitor “it has somehow survived whatever catastrophe that destroyed all life forms on earth, we found it last weak in a digging site on sector DDS3 of the planet ”
The image on the monitor changed. An illustrative animation showed the box opening, then focused and zoomed on a shiny circular metal object inside it
“The circular object you see now have turned out to be a data storage device of a very strange type , the data was stored in the form of microscopic indentations burnt on the face of the circular object probably by some intense light beam . . we have been able to restore some of it , translated it to our language using our top notch hyperlogic alogathrims . The result was an unexpected treasure of information about the Ho-man race, its habits, its culture, its believes, Yesss!..hold your farts gentle beings , for what you will now see will blow your gases away.
On the left corner of the monitor , an image of a black biped creature holding some strange weapon appeared against a gloomy reddish black background. Above him, in big bold letters, stood the words :
The Necrobabes
Public Board
This time the amount of gaseous excitement was enough to make the wall’s anti-rust painting peel off slowly at some spots.
The Alien scientist continued.
“Yes dear colleagues, by the grace of Zong almighty we have stumbled upon this great discovery, the last remaining ancient scroll of wisdom left by the once wise and intelligent Ho-man race, a series of interlinked documents whose subject and purpose is focused on some extremely sophisticated concept called “Snuff”, apparently the greatest ideological concept ho-mans ever produced” said the alien anthropologist on the verge of hydroxyl tears
“This magnificent ideology opens a window on a strange alien world, wonderful cultures, deep philosophies, exotic rituals which would take generations after generations of our most devoted scientists to fully decipher ” he added
The alien audience stared at the monitor, scanning the headlines of the forum threads, their eyes, mouths, and several other orifices were all gaping with awe.
“Snuff seems to be the utmost expression of human feelings and thoughts, it is both pleasure and pain, right and wrong, truth and illusion, it also seems to have a lot to do with their politics, sociology, biology and cabbages. It might even be the truest and most earnest prayer to the great mystique Hoooly Shit. It is every thing the minds and hearts of that civilization had ever embodied . . but, that , my dear colleagues, is not ALL what we have discovered”
A few faint hearts burst of excitement in response. Staining the walls and the floor with green purple oily thing .Nevertheless , the lecturer went on indifferently .
“The most exciting news is that by careful examination of the surface of the data storage device in which those files were found , we’ve discovered a greasy oily ho-man FINGER PRINT.”
Again Hums, Cheers, farts and blotches of diesel oil
“Yes dear colleagues, as you must’ve guessed, it was a finger print of someone who contributed material into those files of wisdom, and by using the Fingerprint-o-Subgenetic-UltraCreator III , we would be able to reconstruct and resurrect a full live ho-man specimen. We are now capable -finally - of bringing to life a fully functioning ho-man who can be questioned . A process which will start right after you finish your drinks.
3-The Resurrection
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From behind a one way see through glass wall, the Alien scientist and his colleagues watched a vast lab area, in the middle of which was a 7 feet long aluminum bench on which a small slide containing Human DNA was placed. Around the bench gathered lots of alien dog like creatures - who were actually lab technicians- preparing the resurrection process, while several other cat like creatures - who where actually genetically engineered alien security staff- were chasing a single mouse like creature who was just a real earth mouse whose unfortunate fate have led him to be resurrected three days before.
“The long silver tubes you see down there are the Optrametric Tissue Synthesizers that will replicate the exact form of whoever Ho-man who made that fingerprint we found on that slide .” stated the alien scientist “The golden rectangular pods are the Mezzo-Paranormal-Mental Vector Analyzers, which will restore the same state of mind of that Ho-man right at the time when she made that finger print. And yes, we believe she’s a female ho-man, a young one according to their average life span, a tall one too, in other words: a bitch.” He added, all the time doing his best to prove that the ridiculously huge research budget granted to him to buy extremely expensive equipment had all been spent in the right manner.
“After the resurrection process is complete, the mind of the ho-man specimen will be scanned , then she will be revived to be interrogated by professor Jolbunz standing beside the bench to finalize the data collecting process. Proff. Jolbunz will be wearing an illudoform disguise to look like a human , one that is recognizable and psychologically acceptable by the ho-man specimen, based on the data scanned from her mind.” The Alien scientist explained.
“And now, dear gentle beings, shall we commence?” said the alien scientist with the revolting alien equivalent of a broad smile, and pushed a button on his remote control.
A couple of beams glittered from the silver tubes over the slide, then crawled back along the metal bench, hummed, brightened in color .Along their glowing tips, long strands of curly red hair slowly began to materialize.
The beams glided forward, creating the delicate contours of a white forehead, an upturned nose, then widened on the sides to create rosy cheeks , took their time in bringing to life the details of soft full lips, moved upward and then glided down again as they made the beautiful chin, then extended forward in a magical sweeping motion as they made the long ivory throat, went round and round as they molded prefect young breasts into form, tingled with a strange chime as they brought to reality the pink nipples, danced to and fro to materialize the taught tummy and floated and dazzled to scalp a pair of long shapely legs.
The alien audience who beheld the perfect human form - and by the virtue of being all specialists in humanology, and therefore accustomed to the grotesqueness of how humans looked like- succeeded in fighting the persistent urge to puke.
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Tori woke up with a terrible headache, she felt as if every molecule in her head was banging itself against all the other ones. she blamed it on the reefer she’d just smoked and figured she must’ve fallen asleep while stoned. She swore she’ll never touch that shit again.
Her vision was blurry, so where all her other senses, but she managed to register three feelings with some hazy level of clarity. The first thing she registered was the coldness she felt along her body, as if she was sleeping naked on a metal bench, the second thing she registered was that she was really sleeping naked on a metal bench, the third thing she registered - the one that made her jump up , cover her breasts with her hands and scream- was the presence of an all nude stranger who didn’t look exactly like Arnold Shwarzenegger, but held a haunting resemblance, sitting beside her.
“Mary-Christ-Mas-Hoooly-Shit” said the alien interrogator, uttering the carefully calculated salute that was supposed to make him sound friendly.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!” replied Tori
“Welcome back , Me have questions” He said with a savage Shawrzinager friendly smile.The one where he shows you how much facial muscles a human face could contain and still manage somehow to look idiotically innocent.
“Wuh? who? WHERE AM I?WHO ARE YOU??” she screamed as she looked at him, then from side to side then at him again.
The alien interrogator, whose mind was linked to the hyperlinguistic computer, tried to understand Tori’s last remarks, failed, retried again, failed again before he finally aborted the attempt, all the while keeping his frozen muscular smile.
Tori jumped from the steel bench and backed away a few steps, her newly resurrected legs failed to support her and she fell. As a result, the cat like security staff - who were just done with chasing the mouse and who were becoming fed up with those silly berserk earthlings- stormed into the room. The alien interrogator sent them a brain signal to stop and so they froze in place, a few of them in mid air.
Tori’s mind raced to find explanations. She remembered being bored at home, she remembered smoking the reefer , she remembered fumbling with her computer while stoned. She tried to make that data add up with the situation she was in as she watched the strange place around her, the nude Arnold who was smiling at her, and the tough looking cats who were suspended a few inches above the ground. Her mind did try to make sense out of all of this, but sense-quite stubbornly-was not willing to be made.
The Arnold guy took a few steps towards her. She instinctively tried her best to cover as much of her body as she can with her hands, only it seemed she was in dire shortage of the sufficient number of hands.
“Who are you? where am I? what do you want?”was what she intended to say, yet in her shriveled state of body and mind, all what came up was ”whur hur warr??”
“Hell Ooh? Me friend. We can Talk some questions?” asked the smiling alien interrogator.
“Damn that stuff I smoked” she thought, then she repeated that thought again audibly, then , realizing that the guy did look like Shwarzenegger, and that the room did have cats in suspended animation, and allowing the utmost absurdity of the whole situation to settle down in her mind, she began to relax to the only probable explanation.
“I’m dreaming!” she mumbled.
“ Me friend ” The Nude Arnold insisted, smiling as he stood one step away from her , offering her his hand.
Hesitantly, she took it. It felt real.
He goaded her to the steel bench, the earth below her feet felt real, the sound her steps made sounded real, it was definitely the last time she’d get stoned before sleeping.
“So.. where- oh never mind, who are you?” she asked as she sat on the bench, trying to convince her self that the coldness her ass felt was nothing but an illusion.
“Me friend, you say stuff, smoke stuff?” He asked, she watched him as he sat down, wondering how wild the human imagination could be as far as imagining someone’s anatomy is concerned, he was wonderfully built.
“Err.. excuse me? “
“You say you smoke stuff. stuff equals snuff?” he asked.
“What? what snuff?” she mumbled
“We don't know, We really need to know” he replied
“Know what??” she was wondering what her mind was hitting at by that weird dream sequence
“Know snuff, what snuff?” then he paused a moment to allow the Hyper linguistic computer to articulate some grammar for him ” We want to know stuff about snuff” he said, smiling proudly.
“Ah, must’ve been that necrobabes site on the net, I must’ve slept in front of the computer. . that reefer really causes lucid dreams”
“Yes yes, necrobabes, the necrobabes- public” he uttered the words with careful awe.
“Oh, so I’m dreaming of a horny snuff interested Shwarzinager.. damn” she smiled.
“Me friend, me want to know stuff about snuff” he smiled back.
Tori shook her shoulders , slapped her face , done the usual stuff she used to do when she wanted to wake up from a frighteningly realistic dream, after a few attempts, she decided to let it pass and go with the flow.
“So you want to talk about sex huh?”
“Sex mean joy-reproduction?” he asked
“What are you? a mentally retarded Arnold?’
“No, I’m no good English creature, sorry.” he corrected her “English what you speak? right?so, how you do snuff sex?”
“hmmm . . oh, well . .that’s silly.. okay, its stuff like, you know, tit torture -”
“Tit . . torture?”
“Yeah”
“Tits are this ?” he asked as he held each of her nipples between the thumbs and forefingers of his hands.
“Aoow!!”she shrieked, tried to back away, but that brought more pain.
The Alien interrogator mind sensed her response through the main computer, and allowed himself to link with her mentally. A surge of contradicting feelings swarmed through his neurons, bringing him strange new sensations. Involuntarily, his hands softened their grip on her nipples and extended to cup the whole mass of her tits, gently at first, then he squeezed.
Tori was confused, part of her mind was stubbornly rejecting the whole situation, another part was scared, a sillier part was wondering if that Shwarzenegger illusion was more like his role in Conan or rather in Last action hero. His hands felt so real.
The Alien’s fingers moved , like a technician at first, pressing dials on her body and recording response, but her responses were so weird and new, they amused him, then transfixed him, then melted his consciousness into a trance. His lips found hers, and before he knew what he was doing he gently, dominantly chewed them.
She moaned.
Her lips opened up, her tongue tried to touch his. His mind read her desires and responded, the mental spark as their tongues met jolted through his body. He no longer found her human form weird or different from his race, he understood her beauty and it captivated him.
The alien scientists behind the glass wall watched intently, unable to contain their revulsion. Yet they kept recording, analyzing a little bit more.
His lips traveled to her chin , he knew the name of what he was doing now, read it in her mind. He was kissing, kissing the smooth skin below her chin, kissing is tasting tasting comes before eating. Eating is what makes life on that world grow.
His lips and tongue traced the pulse in her neck, bending over to kiss her shoulders as she whispered in his ears, telling him stuff, stuff about snuff.
Down below , the thing he now recognized as his manhood, was feeding on the signals that came from her mind, signals that she whispered and others that she felt. Manhood was Man. Dominant was man. Inward goes man.
She no longer felt organic to him, or a creature made of flesh and bone . She was a thing that melts, an entity that throbs. He was a thing that could burn. He held her by the hair and pulled her face back. She winced and moaned and he watched her face. Man .Dominant. Ho-man.
The Main computer went feverish with new data, processing, reprocessing, translating, storing. Crazy readings danced in front of the eyes of the alien watchers,
Man. Dominant. Human
Human. Human. Human
Her eyes went wide and so did her mouth in an expression he recognized as ecstasy as his manhood found her mound. Manhood in mound equals moans, stuff about snuff. Cell eats Cell, fish eats fish. Dom. eats sub. Sub moans.
From her mind words, poems, songs, all stored in her memory floated into his. Jerry Luis’ balls of fire screamed in his ears as he pounded into her, symphonies , jazz, Rhoney James Dio, JaggerElvisDionLenon. All screamed as his hands crept over her shoulder . Strange signals from a strange world, a world where survival is joy, and survival is eating. cell eat cell, dog eat dog, Dom. eat sub. Survival is dominance.
His mouth found her nipples, he licked, wanted to bite.
Her response was pain, pain was joy.
He wanted all her joy, he wanted all his manhood, he wanted more of her, more of him. His hands loved the warmth and the softness of her throat.
From her memory James Dio sang:
Nobody gives without a take, lets take it all
He squeezed.
Her red face , her red hair, her pretty eyes, her pink tongue, her tight sex, his manhood, her breath sounds. All those songs.
He bent to suck her tongue, more of it was protruding. All of her was quivering. Her body going faster in rhythm. Rhythm was music, music was dance. His whole world was swirling in whirlpool of heat, swallowing him so quickly into something inexplicable. His very existance danced on the verge of an explosion.
His body rocked with her , shaking her by the throat. Shaking him by her convulsions. Her nose bled and below her skull her brains were splattered on the metal bench. His mind commanded the silver tubes. The beams scanned her body. Her wounds were sealed. More Pain for her, More Joy, More Man, More Ho-Man.
He screamed.The data on the computer danced.
More Human.
She couldn’t believe what was happening. She got stuck on top of a sustained peek of utmost pain and joy. Both feelings never ceased, never ended. Utmost pain and fulfillment. She never cared anymore about reality or dreams. All so real, so unreal. He pumped her, she moaned, he squeezed, he made her bleed, she screamed and never died or awakened.
The moments of her orgasm came, exploded, and went away, he never letting her go, she grunted, pleaded, asked him to stop, never wanting him to stop. His explosion was building, signals from her mind, not only sounds now but visions. His mind saw the snuff, knew the snuff, asked for the whip, for the knife, for the chainsaw. The Silver tubes hummed, Things materialized.
On the moment of his explosion, on the moment of fulfillment, he was hacking through her body with the long humming silver machine. The sprays of blood covered her face, her wild red hair, the walls. The watchers behind the glass have released the cat guards who were attacking him now, clawing at his bare shoulders, but he ripped them all to pieces.
“Ho-maaaaaaan “ he screamed in triumph.
The Alien scientists were stunned, unable to move as the their colleague, wearing the human form, stood in the middle of the room and turned to face them. As he walked towards the one way see through wall, one muscular arm holding the whirring silver chainsaw, the other one carrying the severed head of his Eve, stepping over the shredded bodies of the security guards, full of a strange pride that infected his consciousness, a disease they never prepared for from a long ago extinct race.
He stood before the wall, his blood covered face slowly forming the innocent muscular smile.
“I’m human” he said as he brought the chainsaw forward to smash the glass barrier.