Quirks and Charms

by Tom Schimmel

  Word got around the galaxy faster than ever. While some citizens of Andromeda would be unable to own their own Trolevian Mind Configuration Calibrator, they could now have something even better than a self-implanting neural communication device.

  Battalions and divisions of the Imperial Army widened their survey of the planets. A military-grade TMC2 made it impossible, in the most literal sense, for any soldier to think for him, her, or its self. They went about their work; conquering planet after planet, and installing the SAIM infrastructure everywhere they went. When they murdered, they felt neither remorse nor dark ecstasy. They did not share in the laughter and tears of the local populations. They did not scream. They did not sing. If the Imperial Army showed up at your planet, you had three choices: 1.

  Die

  2.

  Volunteer for the Imperial Army

  3.

  Go to sleep and get rich.

  The vast majority of ancient Andromeda had been peaceful mammalian creatures. They went to sleep as soon as their planet was connected to the SAIM. By sleeping in cubes and supplying the SAIM with their brain energy, they were awarded large incomes which would allow them to afford monthly payments on larger, even more comfortable cubes.

  Option number three had no real competition. Only a few were principled enough to die. Those who demonstrated the inability to make an important life decision were promptly filtered into the military. Once a military-grade Trolevian Mind Configuration Calibrator crawled inside a head, any form of doubt, reluctance, resentment, or disinclination towards either death or wealth was gone. An old form of thinking was replaced by stimulus and response. There was no guilt trip as they blasted the living piss out of whatever stood in the way of their mission. The SAIM prospered and quickly encircled the galaxy, forming a dull, translucent veil over all of Andromeda.

  As the story alludes, the general populous was so pleased about being rich that few even noticed the murders and atrocities. No one really cared either. They were rich and sleeping well. Dream sequences would remind them regularly to sleep well. They were safe now. The Imperial Army was their army. It was both enormous and extremely well-armed.

  The following letter of submission was a diplomatic move typical of many planets in Andromeda. By expressing gratitude, rather than hostility, they hoped to avoid any confusion regarding their acceptance of the way things had become.

  Dear Emporer Zow,

  It is with our great pleasure that we announce our surrender to your fearsome army. We are grateful that you neglected to ship our pre-paid order of Trolevian Mind Configuration Calibrators and we appreciate instead, being connected electronically to all of the Central Neural Network by means of the Social Artificial Intelligence Moderator.

  All of the physical assets of our planet are now under the control of your technology. Our citizens are working hard and cooperatively building the sleep cubes. We hope those who wavered in their decision are enjoying their basic training in your fine army.

  Our recent communication with the Chief Financial Theory Computer resulted in financial gains which were unheard of prior to your arrival. Our own currency was clearly not profitable and we appreciate how polite your soldiers were as they took it away from us and replaced it with a much greater amount of Zow E-Bucks. Please contact us through our CNN sleep halos anytime you are in town. S.A.I.M. Old! S.A.I.M. Old!

  The Employee-Citizens of Parcheesi 1974

  Over the course of a few hundred Trolevian years, life in Andromeda had changed dramatically. The velocity of change was far too high on any scale of relativity to be considered safe. Emperor Zow had grown obese, even by the bodily standards of giant gadflies. The continued practice of swallowing local threats to his position of power had caused exponential bloating and also, constant hunger. Zow needed more and more to feel full. He had taken to gobbling up small planets to quell his appetite. Eventually, the sheer size of the Emperor was so great, that his home planet tilted sideways and he was dumped off the planet and into the ensconced orbits of Troleve’s many satellites. Forced into his most basic gadfly instincts, Zow had regurgitated his last few customers and spun a trampoline of saliva to net himself between the moons of his home. Zow was a big fat emperor stuck in a hammock. In this gluttonous fashion, he soon ceased to exist.

  Things that outgrow their resources have a collective tendency to become extinct. While Zow himself certainly claimed he was starving to death, it was not for lack of calories that he would perish. Nutrition took a backseat to rudimentary physics. Mass, density, and gravitational pull all enter into the equation. Overlaying the mathematics of the event is the simple fact that a large enough mass with an empty inside is a done deal.

  The collapse of the richest and most powerful creature in ancient Andromeda was calm and quick, like an Earth jellyfish taken out of water. Emperor Zow imploded quietly in orbit around Troleve, turning into a pile of space snot.

  The event passed virtually unnoticed by the empire. The SAIM ran itself. Only a single human on Troleve, gazing at the stars would observe a dripping web of moons in orbit around Troleve. He noted in his journal the following words:

  Amber sky as always night,

  What is here this great delight?

  Sailing through the dead of night?

  Muddled snare of grime and goo

  The universe hacks up loogeys too.

  Everything in the SAIM continued normally for a few weeks. Even the Central Neural Network made no mention of it in its final bulletin to employees of the SAIM.

  Central Neural Network News Headlines

  Snooze It Or Lose It: Zow E-Bucks Making Fans among New Rich

  New Sleep-Over Dream Sequences Big Hit with Teen Employee-Citizens CFTC on Inflation: "WOW!"

  Dreaming Again! Employee-Citizens Love Their Zow E-Bucks

  New Sequence Downloads Get into Your Head - Political Style

  Missing Prison Pod Reports Itself as Non-Existent (FLAGGED SEE BELOW*) Imperial Army Gets Boost From New CNN Base on Parcheesi 1974

  S.A.I.M. As Ever - Waking Up Early May Be Costing You Money

  Fat Ass Emperor Gadfly Losing Weight Battle (FLAGGED SEE BELOW**)

  SVN Neural Waste System Exceeding Expectations

  ___________________________________

  *

  A prison pod has vanished out of physical orbit. Residual radiation gives evidence of a recent wormhole in the area. The disappearance of the pod coincides with a firewall breach at CNN News. Published content at CNN has been locked out and regrettably includes flagged headlines posting from an external and unidentifiable source. The network remains in good order.

  **

  This headline was posted without the approval of CNN

  ________________________________________

  Following the collapse of Emperor Zow, all soldiers of the Imperial Army of Andromeda were still fitted with military-grade Trolevian Mind Configuration Calibrators. They were extremely well-armed and totally unable to think for themselves when the final cycle of orders from their commandeered had expired. Without further ado, they promptly began shooting the piss out of everything around them When there was nothing left to kill and destroy, the mindless soldiers turned on one another with their remarkably powerful weapons.

  The final battle in ancient Andromeda lasted all of three minutes, and created large open spaces which remain abandoned even to this day.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The First Vision

  When the SAIM exploded in Andromeda, chunks of its design and source code ricocheted around the universe like buckshot. Most every remaining celestial body in Andromeda would end up absorbing the brunt of the wave, but even the late great Zymphonomous Bla had not been able to accurately judge the ultimate effect.

  It would stand to reason, by any standards on modern Earth, that even cavemen would have been safe. However, the universe itself, by most standards of reason, is quite a strange place. Things often happen even on Earth which make people scratch their h
eads and wonder.

  Most of the explosive frequencies did indeed meet their demise or entrapment within all the other places in the universe that something can go besides Earth. A few snuck into the Milky Way galaxy. A few even smacked the greenhouse of Venus and thumped into red Mars. Earth was the most elegant of the inner planets. She refracted the waves, like all harmful radiation, gently into her large oceans where, seemingly, they would do no harm.

  For the very great part, this was true. When a wave from the SAIM drifted into a person, they sometimes had heavenly inspirations. An Italian man named Machiavelli intersected with a fleetingly sparse design code in 1513A.D, as he stared into night sky. This particular pebble of history had spent the last few hundred million years in a complex orbital cycle involving loops, spins, drags, wobbles, and high speed straight-aways of exceptional length. Finally it rounded a red dwarf and slingshot itself over a solar wind near Algernon. This put it directly on course with Niccolo Machiavelli, who immediately received a lot of flack for his new ideas. Twenty-one years later, the Italian political sensation would have his book. As the centuries would pass, the idea caught on Earth. Keep the army chock full of weapons and make the people rich. Ignorance will settle in and the rest will run itself. People on modern Earth, when asked how their day is going, will sometimes give this reply:

  “Same old, same old.”

  They have no idea how funny they are being when they say this.

  Long before there was a place on Earth called Italy and things like alphabets and paper and books, an unlucky caveman standing naked outside his cave to greet the day was suddenly blitzed with an ultimate dose of ancient cryptography.

  Ugg.

  Given the primitive times into which caveman Ugg was born, it is remarkable that his brain survived as long as it did. The refracted source code had traveled far to reach Earth. When it did, the planet’s gentle hand steered it harmlessly down toward the Sea of Galilee, where it bounced off the shell of a prehistoric sea turtle who was taking a nap at the surface.

  Like a cosmic beer keg, the wave energy caromed into the caves at Machpelah. Usually his mate (Mrs. Ugg) awoke before he did and stood where he stood, stretching and scratching herself in the light of dawn. Neither of the couple would ever understand what happened. Naiveté was blamelessly with the times.

  Ugg was a true caveman. His closet cave held many pelts and his skill for hunting creatures of the air, considered sublime. Mrs. Ugg gathered and made colored paste. Neither of them ever thought about life. They slept, woke, hunted, gathered, ate, drank, shit, pissed, fucked, and raised babies. Sometimes Mrs. Ugg would put colored paste on her children’s faces and watch as they whoopu-whoopued and ooga-aggahed to express their delight.

  Sadly, caveman Ugg would never again hear another whoopu-whoopu or ooga-aggah from his offspring. He was and still is however, the only human to have seen with his own eyes, the true design of the universe and the wonderfully simple blueprint which it maintains. Ugg had painted this image on his cave wall and then fallen into brooding catatonia.

  Mrs. Ugg was terrified by this innocuous image in their shared bed cave. Her mate had run back into the cave and gone straight for her colored pastes. Blood of beast or juice of berry, Ugg hadn’t seemed to care. Then he had cut the foreskin off his penis with a sharp rock. Far into the future on Earth, his cave would remain under the real estate principal of Hebron, near Bethlehem. It was in this place where caveman Ugg was buried. A crystal was placed into the hole he had carved into his forehead. After his death his mate scrubbed the cave walls violently; but her excellent colored pastes held most of their color. She had a brief and confused mating session with her uncircumcised nephew and died soon after.

  Far into Earth’s future, and unknown by the clan of Ugg, an archeologist would run composition tests of this very cave painting. One sample would include the semen of Mrs. Ugg’s nephew, who had backhanded his spunk across the machine of the universe to demonstrate his dominance. The archeologist would conclude that cavemen painted with manganese (Mn). In the future, when the information superhighway was building more corridors and adding more lanes, the cave painting of Ugg would have made more sense. His image of a large dark object sucking up stars and blowing out the universe may have even gained him widespread recognition as an artist of merit. Social circles would have buzzed with the name of Ugg. A man who was truly in touch with the way things were.

  Thousands of years would pass before modern consumers would unknowingly idolize the machine of the universe through a product line of wet/dry vacuum cleaners which could suck or blow with the flip of a switch. As it would come to be known around the world, a Shop Vac (depending on model) had the power of one and a half to six and a half horses in its engine. Adolescent boys delighted in the possibilities of such a powerful toy. Some even experimented with their own body parts. There were emergency room visits and nasty bacterial infections; as is the case with just about any machine that adolescent boys get their hands on. Fortunately, word gets around the adolescent grapevine. These pioneering experiments were abandoned as far too risky to both body and pride. Near the end of what most people on modern Earth called the twentieth century, a television advertising campaign in the United States of America broadcasted video footage of a Shop-Vac sucking the water right out of a toilet. The commercial proved to be a brilliant analysis of the popular American psyche. It marked a truly successful snare of a target market through suggestion. Widespread purchases of Shop-Vacs soon followed the enticing suggestions of formidable suck power. Satisfaction remained high among most all demographics. Mild post-consumer dissidence was not related to the excellent quality of the Shop-Vac itself; but from the discovery that sucking up the water in your toilet is only fun a few times.

  Should a household member choose to suck up anything besides clean toilet water, they were soon rewarded by the discovery that the questionable material would remain inside the Shop-Vac until someone decided to clean it out.

  In the case of little Raymond Pottles from Camptown, Virginia; the boy was bright enough in a guilty moment to lug the sloshing family Shop-Vac into the garage. With the power of five horses, young Raymond neatly disguised his turd water with the sawdust that accumulated around the base of his father’s table saw.

  “Thank you oh thank you caveman Ugg”, is what Raymond would have said, had he known the ultimate truth. Fortunately for him, he was without a clue.

  Some of Ugg’s nephews circumcised themselves and some did not. This simple difference in penis appearance created divisions and later, war. The widening chasm between the clans of pickle dick and mushroom tip led, over time, to differentiations in hair, skin, body odor, diet, grooming, and more recently, religious custom. Females were strictly kept within their clan of their men. The city became angry, and divided many times. Peace was occasional, and fleeting. The war began when a gang of pickle dicks killed a mushroom tip with a rock to express clearly that regardless of the actions of the late and venerable Ugg, pickle dicks were still the way to go. Wars continued to include disputes over diet, grooming, girlfriends, books, and - finally - whose god was the true god.

  Penises of either type are rarely worn publicly. Opposing fashions and lifestyles are still condemned. Some men circumcise their son’s penises and some continue to retain their foreskin. Some girlfriends bare their skin and dance, while others remain sequestered for reasons of self-preservation. The issue of God has not been resolved, and the fighting continues.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Something Sirius

  Given the elaborate size and design of planet Earth, it has been concluded by humans throughout their various histories, that surely there must be something watching them. Science and religion can both be said to be exercises in this conclusion. Somewhere, something must be paying attention. It is true after all.

  Humans on Earth, like all other warm-blooded creatures, require attention. In the case of humans in particular, the species is well known to go to fantastic lengths i
n order to gain the interests of others. There is a saying among Earth humans that if you are talking, you can’t be listening too. Sometimes humanity listens. Sometimes it talks. This has presumably been occurring in human history since before Zymphonomous Bla was even an itch in his father’s sheath. So to speak of course. We know the story. Bla was about as autodidactic as one could be. Modern Earth has taken again to listening. Not necessarily among the planet’s inhabitants; but rather listening to the heavens, the cosmos, outer space, or whatever you want to call it. Any beings attempting to listen to Earth will find that the planet’s inhabitants enjoy tremendously, the pleasure of sitting in their cubes and watching TV. But it has not always been this way on Earth. An amphibious race called the Nommos, have visited Earth a number of times with the benevolent purpose of lending a hand. Through their introductory efforts, humans learned numbers and alphabets. They learned how to irrigate and cultivate. They learned how to read and write and divide, and even spot the correct stars in the sky.

  The Nommos hail from a star system known on Earth as Sirius. Their original attraction to the planet was an abundance of freshwater. Places now known in Earth history books as Sumer, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Timbuktu were once large lakes. Nommos prefer to land their spacecraft in water and remain close. Nommos like better to remain wet or at least damp at all times.

  Earlier humans were much more receptive to alien spacecraft. Nommos were greeted with respect and honor and perhaps even some justifiable fear. Modern Earth, in contrast, is now surrounded by satellite computers, global surveillance systems, and a huge network of radio telescopes known as the Very Large Array. There is radar, sonar, and Doppler. Optical telescopes can be purchased nearly everywhere by consumers.

  Shortly before the rule of the ancient Egyptians, the Nommos erected three pyramids to mark the three stars of the Sirius system. When the structures were complete, the water surrounding them was drained into the Nile Valley. Modern humans marvel at the incredible precise symmetry the pyramids at maintain to the stars which they mark. Modern humans have only recently discovered the third star. Meanwhile, less modern humans in Timbuktu, known as the Dogons, have known about these amphibious angels for thousands of years. Ask any Dogon in Timbuktu; and he or she will gladly use a stick to draw a picture for you of the Sirius system with symmetrical accuracy and luminosity. In fact, it was from these primitive sand artists that modern man learned where to point his telescope. The Dogons have been visited many times over the years. Unlike most of modern Earth, they are quite comfortable with the subject of visitors from other places. However, it is much more difficult these days for the Nommos to drop by and say hello to their old friends without being noticed. Not only would they face the hazards of modern Earth weaponry; but also the possibility that their arrival would cause social breakdown and anarchy. In the interests of peace, the Nommos now have grown content mostly to watch Earth from a cautious distance. Humans on Earth have come a long way, and they are a lot more paranoid and well-armed than they used to be.