CHAPTER 35
On Garbotron
Unfortunately, immortals don't need to breathe, otherwise they would only be 'immortals until something trivial like a lack of oxygen comes along and kills them' which isn't terribly immortal at all. It sure is a nice bonus though, breathing. The last thing I remember is seeing the noxious green vapours surrounding Garbotron from 8 light years away, immediately before we were sedated by some faction of Kroonum officers and blasted toward the aforementioned noxious green vapours. We were awoken quickly after crash landing upon the surface of Garbotron. The Trintaniamite Clorin-Phrasfate enforced space pod melted immediately from the horrific fumes encased in the 'atmosphere' of the rubbish heap of a planet. Essentially, we suffered the immense pain anyone else would upon entering the Garbotron atmosphere, without the luxury of having the heinous scent and toxicity instantly killing us. Instead we writhed and wriggled and gasped and choked and vomited and cried and urinated and, upon realizing our tears and vomit and urine were the closest thing to fresh liquid on the planet, we began collecting it like raindrops in the Sahara and trying to get it back into the wretched dust bags our bodies were becoming. When I say we, I really mean me. At the time I assumed we were all going through the same ordeal. We weren't. After what seemed like another 15, 000 HL's of pain and suffering my eyes and organs and body finally adjusted to the horrific surroundings and I was able to see and hear and do what could only be described as 'breathe' the soupy, filthy, disgusting 'air'. Rip and Wilx were nowhere to be seen. I swam through a lake of feces. I climbed a mountainous range of assorted, useless and flimsy plastic things labelled 'made in china'. I charted a path through razor sharp ravines of pointy rocket ships. Suddenly, emerging from an intricate cave and crater system created by cannon blasts, I saw what I was certain must be the new dwellings of Rip and Wilx. Miraculously, amongst all of the filth and rubbish and refuse, there was a swath, an impressively large swath at that, of clean and organized terrain. Tiny, miniscule bins with wheels had been crafted around the perimeters of the area. Each bin was meticulously sorted by classifications scribbled in impossibly too small to read handwriting. The arrangement was simply, astonishingly, perfect. If ever a creature were to be dumped upon this planet and dedicate their existence to cleaning the place up, this was the way to do it. But not a creature could be seen. I gingerly weaved my way through the dense, bin based perimeter and stepped foot on the first patch of clean ground I had seen since arriving on this horrible, forgotten waste dump of a planet.
“No! No! Mustn't enter the oviform from here!” Squeaked the most obnoxiously tiny, shrill and high-pitched voice imaginable. “There is no cleansing station here! This isn't a formal entrance. Mustn't enter the oviform from here! No! No! Go back and around. Back and around you must go! Mustn't enter the Oviform from here!”
“H-hello?” I spun my head around searching for the source of this shrieking vocalization. “Who are you? Where are you? What are you?”
“Get back! Get back outside of the oviform. I've worked far too long and hard for this. You're tracking outside contaminants into the sacred area. Back I say!”
I felt a small tickle inside my left ear and reached my finger in to give it a scratch.
“STOP!” Shrieked the voice at an unbearable level of decibels, bringing me cringing to my knees.
“One quick question,” I gasped, “have I gone completely insane?”
“No you imbecile, you just weren't very smart to begin with. Now get back outside the Oviform and I'll explain everything.”
“Okay.”
I got back outside of what I assumed could be this 'oviform' the squeaky, mysterious voice in my left ear kept going on about.
“Now move counter clockwise... No! The other way you twit!”
“I thought you said you would explain everything once I got outside of the Oviform.”
“And that's exactly the kind of instant gratification and self-obsessed stupidity that leads a species to produce a never-ending pile of garbage and dump it on an innocent planet like this. Keep moving until you reach the cleansing station, we'll clean you up and then I can fill you in on the details you seek at the epicenter dome.”
“Um, okay.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay.”
Never before had I felt so much anger, fury and justified dominance from such a seemingly small source. I was at once humbled in awed reverence to whatever was emitting this tiny voice. It commanded respect and demanded appreciation for the work it had done. I felt I had personally done it wrong, and owed it whatever it asked of me.
After a trip through the ingeniously designed cleansing station, I was instructed and bullied through the clean area towards the epicenter dome, a half submerged bubble containing slightly less filthy air and little else. The little else it contained consisted primarily of a large, glass-like, telescopic lens pointed at the floor.
“Look in the lens and put the ear piece in.”
I noticed there was a few cables attached to the side of the lens, and assumed one of these must be the earpiece.
“Not that ear piece dumbass.”
A few more insults and I had the correct ear piece in and was looking in the lens at what appeared to be a fruit fly, sitting in a fruit fly sized rocking chair, speaking into some sort of micro-voice amplification device. Behind the fruit fly was a giant scale model (giant only in comparison to the fruit fly) of the Oviform and surrounding filth, with diagrams and plans outlining the next phases of clean up and organization.
“So, what are you doing here contaminator?”
“Um, well, I was sentenced to come here and find a beard if you must know.”
“Yes, I must. Aren't you curious what I'm doing here you selfish thing?”
“Very much so actually. Did you do all of this yourself?”
“You bet I did. Hardly made a dent yet, but I'll get it all cleaned up eventually. I've got the perfect system designed. No thanks to nitwits like you breaking the sacred perimeter and setting me back. No matter, time matters not to me. Results. Results are what matters to me.”
“Forgive me for being blunt. But can you tell me how this is even possible? How are you alive? The average fruit fly only lives...”
“Does anything about me seem average?” The stinging reality of his inflections actually hurt my brain, further humiliating me.
“Well, no, but I just thought...”
“Shut it. Nobody cares what you just thought. Certainly not me. Kick back and listen to my story, you owe me that much at least.”
“Okay,” I sheepishly replied. “Can I sit down?”
“No.”
“Okay,” I sheepishly replied again.
The remarkable little fruit fly began to weave the most serendipitous little tale I'd ever heard. I couldn't believe a word of it at the time, but before sitting down to write this story of mine, I used my immortality combined with time travel to go and research all of the details of these events to make sure I got everything right and understood it myself. Everything the little fruit fly said happened exactly as he/she/it said it did.
After Herb and me had injected ourselves with the immortality formula back on earth, we had carelessly tossed the seemingly empty syringe into the garbage. In the same garbage bag was a banana peel. In the white part of this simple, decomposing banana peel, there was a cluster of fruit fly eggs. In one of these eggs hatched a small and thirsty fruit fly. It would one day call itself Milt.
“The first liquid I came across was a drop at the needle end of a syringe,” reminisced Milt. “As soon as it entered my bloodstream I knew that I had been changed drastically forever. I felt such an overwhelming surge of vitality and immunity. After watching about five million generations of fellow fruit flies hatch and decease, I began to figure out that I wasn't the same as all other fruit flies.”
Oblivious to what was happening, one day the poor little thing was cra
mmed into a rocket ship with rotting piles of slop and blasted off to the surface of Garbotron. One of the first rocket ships to arrive on the planet, Milt would witness the complete transformation of the untainted sphere into the abhorrent, festering museum of human discharge it would become. And I thought watching humans become Greegs was despicable! Milt had seen the unseen. The by-product of humanity. The sheer, unconscionable, non-stop, never-ending accumulation of pure, useless, never had to exist in the first place, garbage.
“Why have you taken it upon yourself to clean this all up yourself? You didn't do any of this!” I wept, feeling nothing but pity and admiration for the gritty, determined fruit fly.
“Whether I like it or not, this is my home. This is the situation I was born into, or ended up at, these things I cannot control. What I can do, is my part to set things right. What good is done by moping about who is 'responsible' for this mess? What the human being will that accomplish?” Milt stressed human being with the utmost of vehemence, making it the nastiest of curses I've ever heard. “The mess is here, and so am I. I can either live in it, and whine about how nothing can be done, how it isn't my 'responsibility', or I can get to work tackling the thing. What have I got to lose?”
I thanked him profusely for his story. I told Milt he was an inspiration and perhaps the most remarkable little creature ever to exist. Milt told me to shut up and that my silly beard was in bin #897432 – GLPOA357%&11.FFF and gave me a magnifying glass, a map and insisted I piss right off and never return as Milt had work to do.
I understood completely.
Greegs & Ladders - By Zack Mitchell and Danny Mendlow Page 37