12 September 2011

A PRICKLE OF PUPPIES


The day after the cylinders opened, everyone got their very own parasite from outer space. They looked like puppies in order to minimize the rioting, burning and general awfulness that panicked humans perpetrate in the name of being the animal that prays and wars. After all, every dead human was one less "doghouse"!

Mum and Da did their best to not look terrified as the parasites swarmed over Harry with obvious interest.

Someone, they knew, was going to get a bellyful of space parasite eggs!

One of the "puppies" ran off, and Harry felt the tug of geneered pheromones like a choke-chain wrapped about the root of his very soul.

Perhaps Mum was thinking bad thoughts about fire and hatchets again?

Overfull with writhing larvae, the "puppy" rubbed itself against the ground and gave off an awful cloud of stink. Mum thought deeply of algebra and novel sex positions in an attempt to mask her murderous intent.

But the thing knew. IT KNEW.

Like a furry spring it leapt upon her chest and vomited a mass of space parasite eggs into her mouth. 

She struggled in vain, for it wasn't so much many tiny eggs as it was an enormous mucus-lubed sac of them. It all went down in one sudden, awful swallow.

Having fulfilled its cosmos-appointed purpose, the thing rolled over and expired.

Later, Harry found a new parasite had been sent to link with him. He soaked a tennis ball in 9-oxybutylcharybdotoxin and chucked it at the "puppy".

"FOOL INCUBOY," the "puppy" barked in his mind, "THERE ARE NO NEURONS IN THIS NODE. WE WILL LICK YOUR POISON—"

"—AND REGURGITATE THE BONES OF NAUGHTY CHILDREN WE HAVE EATEN JUST THIS VERY MORNING."

Suddenly, Jasper the quisling scooted up on his fly rollerblades.

The thing communed with whatever was growing inside of Jasper. "The Wilsons down the street are pretending to be subsumed," said Jasper, "But they put the better parts of themselves down the garbage disposal."

"WE KNOW," barked the "puppy" silently, "YOU WILL NOW ENGAGE IN STANDARD PROCEDURE 3905."

"Stab, shoot, burn!" chuckled Jasper.

Harry couldn't stand it anymore. "Vomit your eggs into me, you little bastard! Get to it! Or so help me God I will squeeze the life out of you!"

And so he did.

"ASK YOURSELF," the "puppy" barked softly inside Harry's mind, "HOW IS IT WE FIT, OUR TWO SPECIES? WE EVOLVED ON DIFFERENT WORLDS, WINDING ABOUT DIFFERENT STARS, SO MANY LIGHT YEARS APART."

"IT IS CLEARLY THE WILL OF YOUR GOD THAT WE SHOULD CLEAVE INTO YOU. YOU ARE A CONFUSED SPECIES, BLIND TO YOUR COSMIC DESTINY—"

"—BUT WE KNOW. AND WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU BE WHAT YOU WERE MEANT TO BE."

Harry had to admit, it wasn't so bad once you just let go and accepted it.

With their stubby legs, the things from the stars needed people to push them around in carts...

The chilly limits of the squared-cubed law meant they needed people to keep them warm...

They needed every one of us...

And isn't that what makes life worth living, to be needed?

Every one of us, needed, perhaps even "loved"...

Until we're all used up.

03 June 2011

God's Own Editorial Cartoon


From time to time when the wind shifted at the back door I caught the unmistakable whiff of rotting flesh. It was but the faintest hint, like a long-gone lover's perfume, gently nudging a memory to life but not stroking long enough for arousal. I'd get yanked backwards out of the Internet, look up from my laptop and coffee, scrunchy-faced and think, That smells like... must be something under the greenhouse... and then the wind would shift again and it would be gone.

Just as quickly I'd be back to work, some slowly submerging part of my mind figuring it would either get dramatically worse or nature would just kind of sort it all out.

Repeat at odd intervals for weeks, and then dolly-zoom on yesterday:

We're in the backyard grilling and I catch the scent. That submerged memory rises and bursts in my mind like a viscous swamp bubble. Something under the greenhouse. I wander over to the far corner where it meets the fence and the neighbor's wild growth of enormous greenery and get socked in the head by the odor. I bend down to look under the greenhouse and the stench abates. I rise and the volume cranks back up to breakfast-wrestling. Puzzled and nauseated, I cast about, homing in on the epicenter of—

There are moments where you see things so painfully clear, it's like God's Own editorial cartoon, where an enormously fat man in a diaper wrestling with two hookers on a pile of money somehow encapsulates 30 years of socioeconomic history in a few deft strokes of the pen. A maximized fullness of understanding rendered with the absolute minimum of material and effort.

Momentarily stunned, I say aloud, without turning, "I have to clean up something truly horrible." I do my best to convey you don't want to know with word-choice and tone. I don't move, shielding the eyes I know will be summoned to my back by my voice.

My wife hesitates, words and tone doing the trick. "What—is it?"

"You don't want to know." Then, "I'll take care of it." I turn and stride into the house trying to figure the best—and quickest—way to handle it. Garbage bag, no, two, double-bagged, like a giant glove, gonna have to be hands-on, lift slowly, don't pull...

I am suddenly jerked backwards to The Night of the Great Pooting, where the dog was extremely excited about something in the dark but returned almost instantaneously and with a great stink. It billowed and rose through the house, waking all within and making us fear for the amount of de-stinking labor we'd have to suffer before sleep take us again. Luckily, the dog appeared to have been merely grazed, somehow dodging the shot, at the edge of the cone of stink rather than at the center. At the time I thought it a great boon of luck (and not caution or skill on the part of the dog) but now I knew that it was only because the dog was not the target. The thing had pooted at Death itself in a vain attempt to drive the Grim Reaper off.

The possum had been traversing a mildly treacherous section of fence, one where a hand-span gap narrowed to nothing in a long V that terminated, unfortunately, more than one possum-body length above the ground. Here, human enterprise, entropy, physics and a primitive brain all conspired to do the poor beast in. With footing lost, he fell head-first into a puzzle he couldn't solve, at least not before Death would have him. So he hung by the neck at the bottom of that V, scrabbling and pooting, pooting and scrabbling, then menaced by dogs as he pooted every last ounce of poot he could muster.

What was left, weeks later, demanded to be photographed, at least by those at a safe remove; but for me and the requirements of the task at hand taking pictures was the last thing on my mind. I wanted it over with, and now.

It looked, felt, sounded, smelt and tasted exactly like you'd think, only knobbed up beyond 11.

I can still see the cartoon stink lines.

21 April 2011

Boobs & Armageddon: A Meditation


Life begins with a sound like a flushing toilet.

I gain consciousness by degrees amid the viscous swirl, my brain lit with cram-download. I become human in moments, a blur-crawl from infancy to full-fledged killer as the gro-gel sluices into the depths. The first sensation is pain as my feet suck to the sharp-edged grid of the vat's drain floor, followed by cold, then weakness and shame as I collapse under my own weight onto all fours, falling onto my side, and finally, gagging, yank the branching umbilicus from my guts, lungs, nose and mouth.

I haven't even taken my first real breath and I vomit a couple liters of snot.

Luckier than most of humanity, I know who I am and why I'm here. I think of my people, dropping from the trees to take on the larger predators, becoming what all life on Earth fears, stamping our bootprint into the backs of all things—even lights in the night sky—and then pulling the trigger on ourselves and pissing a miracle into less than nothing. "Thanks," I rasp with fire in my throat, "you bunch of no-good sons-of-anuses." I'm not sure the idiom is correct, though the visual feels somehow right.

MOTHER gives me three hours, though I'm ready in 20 minutes—cleaned up, girded, strapped and armed. I waste the remainder of the time sitting, ramrod straight, among the broken things. Vast machinery of unknown purpose crowds the cavern into closed spaces, all it it echoing with playback of the countless missions I've failed before. Each loop is a snippet of exclamations, breathy oaths, the chatter of automatic fire, screams that grow with proximity and end with a roar, or the metallic patter of mostly deflected bullets, the whump-crunch of worse, or the flea's-knee klick of lost telemetry.

This time, I'm good to go.

The playback ends. MOTHER dials open the lock. I step inside and take a final lungful of clean air, tap the ammo-count on the .75 and spool up the MASER, all before the iris valve pinches off the last bit of sanity and humanity behind me. I check the cycle time and prime a grenade for a hair just past that, position myself before the outer door, balancing arm extended, grenade fuzing quietly next to my head in the other fist.

A circle of candy-colored light bursts from the center of the outer iris and I'm already halfway through the throwing arc. The grenade vanishes into the bright and rings the metal hull like a bell. Blowback scorches my breastplate.

I stride into the mess and leave my bootprint in the ones still breathing.

•••

This is life for long enough that I would be viking-shaggy (if I could but grow hair) and a-dangle with skulls and flapping hides (were I to collect trophies) and with a name that precedes my arrival (if the things out here could speak). Instead, it just goes on until I'm low on ammo.

••

You'll know her when you see her. A human woman, bound and magnificent, outsized curves straining the boundaries of adolescent fantasy. She is attired as savages might swath the Venus of Willendorf for sacrifice, exposing enough lusciousness to attract the eyes of the Gods while covering those few bits that make Them blush. She stands proud and unbowed atop the stepped pyramid, smeared with handprints, a mane of wild hair obscuring her eyes, shoulders, and most of her back. A sea of admirers laps at her tiny feet. They chant blasphemies.

I give the suit a moment to read the crowd and calculate a trajectory before lighting the thrusters and jumping in, crushing four of them and burning others as I hit and leap away, CBM dispensers spinning wedges of shrapnel off my back as my boots leave the earth, feather-light. With a hop, skip and a jump I'm up the pyramid and arcing back down toward the small stone square carved with caricatures of talking cars and skeletons in business suits. I land in a wash of smoke and flame, sock the high priest in the nugget with a mailed fist, snatch the girl and rocket away.

Arrows fashioned from the bric-a-brac of a dead civilization shatter across my ass and pincushion hers, though she makes no sound, this brave Concubine of Death. She'll make a fine MOTHER of the New Human Race.



Back at the hab I toss her onto the waterbed, as is fitting for this moment in History, the way a pulp hero or misogynist might. The suit releases me, a tripartite zippered maw vomiting a pink and hairless doll. 

She lounges on the undulating bed stiffly. 

I step to the foot of it and remove my shirt in a double-fisted spray of buttons and begin to fumble at my belt. Some of the foam rubber has come loose from her curved belly and I spy—with rising horror—the metal beneath. As the whole of human history bottlenecks and dolly-zooms on me and the appliance, my horror redoubles and then does so again as I realize I've never seen my own genitalia. I can't, for the life of me, remember whether or not I have a penis.

11 March 2011

Once upon a time you realized there was a monster under the rug.


[pic of rug with not inconsiderable bulge in middle]

You got the nail gun out straight away, but understood that if you nailed the bulge you'd only tack the rug to a very angry monster.

[pic of you with nail gun, considering bulge]

So you ingeniously tacked the rug down all around the edges so the monster had nowhere to go.

[pic of rug all nailed down around the edges]

And set to kicking the living crap out of the monster.

[pic of you putting the boots to the bulge]

When suddenly...

[pic of quivering bulge, with word balloon]

BULGE: (mama)

Your heart melted. How could you be so horrible? Surely even the worst monsters are merely misunderstood! You began to pry the nails loose to make amends...

[pic of bulge near an open end of the rug, with a li'l baby doll face peeking out from under with word balloon]

BABY FACE: mama

For surely we will all learn a valuable lesson from your mistake.

[pic of monster rearing up, throwing rug off, a mass of tentacles and folded insect legs, rows of shiny black eyes and scything mouthparts, a child's baby doll held carelessly upside down in a curled, dripping tongue]

TOY DOLL: mama

31 December 2010

THE DEAD WATCH YOU MASTURBATE


What if the dead are attracted to impending orgasm? As you close in they swarm and beat about your skull, inside and out, and then they settle in, hanging on for a lil jolt. When the moment comes, they flare from your head like an invisible crown of light, stiff, vibrating slightly as they feed. 

Whatever you do, dont think of this the next time you... 

Well, you know.

05 October 2010

In which I throw my very sad hat into the Internet fanfic ring.


On a rogue moon orbiting our galaxy perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic Im setting up the ultimate Dungeons & Dragons session beneath a spectacular sky spread not with the hard sparkle of stars but the oblong smears of distant galaxies. The Milky Way extends itself enormously off the head-bending curve of the gray, too-near horizon, providing a dim, but sufficient, light for what is sure to be an unforgettable, uh, evening, I guess. 

A borrowed alien artifact—a hemispherical field generator—keeps the good stuff like air and warmth in while keeping the bad stuff like hard radiation and micrometeorites out. At least for the amount of time I have on the contract, which, if I understand it correctly, should be more than enough to complete the adventure as written. 

The gaming table is a cheap wooden picnic table complete with bench seats and splinters, all I could afford after stealing a time machine and trading most of the human race for the favors and technology to make this session possible. But otherwise I have provided for my guests, rolling up characters for them to save time, effort and confusion. Also spread upon the red-and-white checkered tablecloth are bowls of off-brand pretzels and poverty sodas with names like Dr. Popper and Poopsie Cola. Not for a lack of desire for nicer things, but only because where we are and what were about to do has cost most of what the human race would produce in its entire run. At least thats the price quoted by my alien benefactors, and what do I know? Im a Dungeon Master, not an economist, dammit. 

I shuffle through my notes one last time, take in the entire spread from universe to snacks, and, after a deep breath, snap my fingers. 

In four staticky discharges of collapsing ball lighting, they arrive. 

  Emotional Spock


He laughs, he cries, hell do handcuffs and Nazi outfits. Should go a long way toward putting the tic in Chaotic Neutral. 

Audio-Animatronic Abraham Lincoln



The only guest with special needs, Ive provided RoboLincoln with a small nuclear pile to keep him perpetually powered, and a dual tape deck from the 1980s so when one of his program tapes runs out the other one has a pre-programmed tape-swap sequence that allows him to flip sides without interference from a human operator. 

John Wayne Genghis Khan


Hot off the set of The Conqueror. Who says an American Icon cant be a mongoloid? You? 

Plain Ol' Eleanor Roosevelt


Yep. Just that. Im hoping she can be the face of the party. 

For the briefest of moments they sit around the table, looking first, with a start, at the person across from them, then around at the awesome gaming spread and finally up into Forever. 

I smell the unmistakable odor of Human Endeavor—someone has crapped their pants. 

Eleanor Roosevelt lets out a piercing shriek and falls back from the table, nearly upending it as she goes. I realize shes failed her SAN roll—and were not even playing a game where thats supposed to happen! 

John Wayne Genghis Khan rushes to her fetal form, trying to comfort her. He shakes his head in disbelief. "Holy cow—youre Eleanor Roosevelt!”
 
Ms. Roosevelt blinks rapidly, the madness suddenly fleeing her face. “And youre... Genghis Khan?!
 
“No maam,” he laughs, hearty and deep, with real mirth. “If I were Idve already raped you by now.” 

Emotional Spock stiffens bolt upright. “What,” he asks with eerie calm, “did you just say?”
 
“I said,” John Wayne Genghis Khan drawls, “Idve raped her by now.

EmoSpock pushes himself up from the table with his fists, eyes smoldering. “You will do. No. Such. Thing.” 

“Calm down there, skinny, Im not gonna hurt her. It was a hypotheti—aww, screw it. Why dont you siddown before I make you.” 

“THEN MAKE ME!” screams EmoSpock. 

John Wayne Genghis Khan stands and puffs out his chest. “Dont think I wont, pilgrim!” 

EmoSpock snarls and they meet over the careful spread of dice, character sheets, maps and minis. It starts like a windmilling slap fight, as if neither of them wants any but both are too manly or enraged to admit it. The row rapidly escalates as EmoSpock keeps trying to pinch John Wayne Genghis Khans neck even as he is throwing loopy haymakers that constantly fail to connect. Mutually frustrated, they go to grappling and start rolling around on the table, ruining everything. 

This is the part where I pull the gun from my sweatpants waistband and pop a round into the ceiling. Of course it ricochets around the inside of the field for a sphincter-clenchingly long time before burying itself, thankfully, in the bone-dry regolith. 

EmoSpock is crying, bits of pretzel and minis stuck to his wet face.

“Look, guys, cmon—lets just sit down and play this really fun game Ive set up for you. Its called Dungeons and Drag—” 

“You brought us here?” EmoSpocks face twists with rage, the cords in his neck standing out like F-Majors, if F stood for fuck you up.

I swallow. “Uh, no. He did.” I point at John Wayne Genghis Khan.

“Aw, thats a loada bull—”

But EmoSpock has hurled himself over the table and planted a double side kick to the sternum just like they teach at Starfleet Academy. They collapse to the floor into a furball of cocked limbs and profanity.

Maybe I can pull something out of this after all. I turn to RoboLincoln. “Okay, you stand at the top of a dark stairway carved from the very bones of the Earth. It winds down into the depths one ten-foot drop after another—these are not steps for mortal men. Somewhere in the deep you hear something like distant thunder, or screaming.” I lean forward expectantly. “What do you do?”

RoboLincoln clicks and buzzes, looks from the dice in front of him to his character sheet and then seems to regard me thoughtfully. “Four score and seven years ago,” he starts, “Bzzzurt, fathers brought forth incontinent, a nude nation, conceived in Labia, and dedicated to the propositioning that all men are created fzzzapt.”

“Ah. Yeah. I'll take that as a going down.

Thin shapes at the edge of my vision—they're here for the field generator.

“Wait! No! Just a sec—”

It pops like a soap bubble and the atmosphere leaps away into the frigid sky. The air in my lungs hops after it, scampering out of my face in a gut-punching rush. I feel the spit boil off my tongue. As my blurred vision dims I can only think, oh, god, this is bad, but RoboLincoln—and then the Final Darkness swallows me whole.

~

RoboLincoln sits at the table soundlessly reciting the Gettysmeg Address, dutifully flipping his tape over whenever it runs out... for four score and 10,000 years.

You know, for kids!


Someone said I should write a children's book. So I did. Gather ’round, kids, and let Unka Tannhauser lay a heartwarming tale of God-given gifts, hope, and The Finish Line on your asses:

PAJOOKIE

 

by Chris Tannhauser



Once upon a time, on a small planet nestled in the fringes of our own Milky Way galaxy, a great race of people built a fabulous civilization.

And it was in this civilization that a child named Pajookie lived, and went to school much as you do.

Of all the subjects that Pajookie had to study—cybermorphics, hyper-gnostic crabmatics, and “grund”—he loved art the best.

Art on this world was very different from the art you know; Pajookie could grab the sky with his mind and sculpt with clouds and rainbows. He could squeeze poems out of sunbeams.

But most of all he could make. It didn’t matter what he made, whether is was with rocks and hair and glue; or old skyfish bones and buttons and glue. Pajookie loved to make things.

One day, Pajookie’s teacher-node made an announcement that set Pajookie’s mind on fire. 

“Class,” burbled the teacher-node, “I have just received confirmation that the Artworld will be coming to our system in a few days.”

Artworld! The entire class hissed quietly, excited. Artworld—a rogue planet populated by artists; tunneling though hyperspace it materialized every now and again, seeking talented children to come and live and make art forever!

“There will be an art contest at the end of week,” bubbled the teacher-node, “The winners will live on Artworld—forever.”

Nothing but art forever, thought Pajookie. His tendrils shook. I have to win that contest. I just have to.

On the first day, Pajookie tried to think of what he could do to impress the Artists and live forever. He thought and thought, he thought until he thought he would pop. But nothing would come to him.

Standish, his automatic servant, whose brain was nothing more complicated than 100 trillion gears the size of molecules, stood politely by his side. “I’m sure your project will be smashing,” he reassured.

Meanwhile, Deidre, one of Pajookie’s broodmates, began to coagulate light in the classroom foundry.

On the second day, Pajookie hunted and trapped a rainbow, and borrowed a word from the sun. But he still had no idea what he was going to do with them.

“That’s a very fat rainbow,” said Standish. “Nice catch, sir.”

Deidre, on the other tendril, took her gooey blobs of light and hung them in a lattice, and fixed the lattice into a great machine.

On the third day, Pajookie took the rainbow and the word to his paste-beast, which was much like a cat filled with glue. But Pajookie stroked the paste-beast wrong and it vomited all over his project, gluing the rainbow to his primary sensory cluster, the word to the bottom of his shoe, and Pajookie to the paste-beast. His project was ruined. “I’ll never win now!” wailed Pajookie miserably.

“What a naughty paste-beast!” exclaimed Standish, “Bad paste-beast! Bad!”

Pajookie paid no attention to Deidre’s project that day. He was far too sad to even notice that she was singing softly, giving each blob of light a different note.

On the last day, Pajookie gave up. He didn’t even try. He just held his primary sensory cluster in his tendrils and did his best to keep from crying.

Standish was sympathetically quiet.

Then Deidre threw the switch on her machine and the lights twinkled and played their notes. The music was hauntingly beautiful. Pajookie only cried a little bit.

Pajookie picked at his lunch, disinterested no matter how hard it danced. The other children ran and squealed about the play yard, for in the sky everyone could see it—Artworld was in orbit far above them. It shone like a brilliant drop of rain, falling forever. Pajookie didn’t even look up.

Later that afternoon, Dada, the Lord of Art, teleported in from Artworld to judge the projects. He marched hurriedly along the row, waving his hand dismissively at the projects. When he reached Deidre’s light harp he paused. Deidre bowed deeply, and switched it on. Dada listened, his brows knitting tighter and tighter. Then, he spoke. “Yes, yes, standard,” he said, waving his hand. He strode onward to Pajookie, the last child.

He looked around, puzzled. “And where is your project, youngling?”

“I don’t have one,” said Pajookie glumly.

The Lord of Art brightened. “Very interesting. Very interesting, indeed.”

“Ahem,” interrupted Standish, “If I may be so bold—not having a project is not his project, per se—he really doesn’t have one.”

“Ahh,” sighed Dada, sounding very disappointed.

“He did have one,” Standish said, “But it went—”

“It went all wrong,” Pajookie finished.

“I see,” said Dada. “Why isn’t it here?”

Pajookie was flabbergasted. “It was terrible!” he blurted.

“That,” said Dada sternly, “Is for me to judge.”

Dada, the Lord of Art, teleported out, having failed to find an artist worthy of living forever on Artworld. Later that evening, the glowing speck of Artworld itself vanished from the sky.

Pajookie gave up the art he loved, and tried many different things in the meantime...

He tried ice-wrestling and bug rodeo and went to a “grund” championship. Pajookie even got quite good at skyfishing, using a back-pack catapult that fired nets filled with hooks. And while that sounds very cruel, it isn’t, for skyfish have no brains as we understand them, in fact, they aren’t even alive. But they are delicious.

“Nice shot, sir.” That was all Standish had to say most days.

The weeks went by and it got to the point where Pajookie didn’t even miss art anymore. Well, almost. Sometimes, when he saw a rainbow, or heard the sun whisper, he thought of art. But it hurt too much. It hurt too much to think that he wasn’t good enough to be chosen, it hurt too much to think that the thing he loved most was something he would never do again.

So he sucked it up and drank deep of despair to the point of no return and fell through life as the numb do until he collided with the weird falling-while-stopping-dead that is middle management. And though he ended up owning a knock-off of that famous four-space nitrogen-ice sculpture of god it brought him no joy for it was nothing but a reminder of the light he had let die inside.

Pajookie’s only regret as the universe let slip the bonds that held him covalent, surrounded by a disappointing array of emotionally-stunted halfwits, was that he never had the balls to do a shooting spree. Literally—for the law of the land required at least five gonads to purchase a biomangulator.

Goddammit all—

THE END