Day 16: Hopeless in Serulean

(meanwhile, across town)

The ZZZZOERP took us totally by surprise, and while its significance was not known to us yet, it’s significance wake washed over us with such force that we were momentarily caught in a meaningfulness eddy. Currents of import authoritatively washed great consequence riiples over us. My ally in our temporal-sojourn remarked that his suit was registering a non-triviality factor of over 50 Brubecks, a unit named for Dave Brubeck, the gold standard in significance, even 90 million years after his being eaten by Jacky Chang, noted action comedy star from Changland.

Momentousness rocked us back to our senses. At my feet lay the galgravolt whose origins were as yet unverified. Yet all information available to us by sensory input as well as by over 100 digital HD satellite chanels pointed toward the unlikely, impossible, indeed, terrifyingly significant possibility that I, (name deleted), had reverted to a maker, and reduced the police officer to this lowly state.

We hadn’t much time to consider it, as without his fatalistic exo-skeleton, my recently acquired ally became quite skittish and demanded we vacate the domicile before the galgravolt regained consciousness. If it imprinted on us while still in its post-natal clambitude, it would “oyster” us, considering us delicious oysters, and thus, its parents. You see, at their origin, Galgravolts were intensely stupid beasts. Sure, they were fearsome, beasts when assembled, but they were the type of thing that was so stupid, that despite being dead, dissected, disassembled, and reassembled into the shape of a Cryo-sedan (the coldest hybrids yet invented), they refused to acknowledge their own mortality, and gradually, through force of ignorance, transmuted their body into a sleek rapacious predator, who thought it was a delicious clam. Now, ordinarily, a predator that believed it was a shelled mollusk was not to be feared. Never mind that in my own time, mollusks had lost their hard shells, and become softer, dumber, slower, and had the evolutionarily dangerous habit of intentionally climbing intot he mouths of hungry people. Suffice it to say, their vastly increased flavor does not bode well for their survival chances as a species.

In my time, the Galgravolt is the deadliest predator. Potentially. It never kills anything, but should it ever happen to realize that it is infact a deadly predator, it’s assumed that it would be unstoppable. As a result, everyone alive after the creation of the first galgravolt, during the phase of human evolution dubbed both “the phase of the makers” and “super-Saturday 2000”, has attempted to avoid any conversation with the galgravolts, lest they accidentally let it slip that they are, infarct, the most deadly creatures ever to come into existence. This has worked, so far. (foreshadowing).

The two of us inspected our surroundings. Well, he inspected, i inscented and to some extend, excreted and reimbibed certain gnosis inducing phlegms. What we determined was that we were in a vast rectangular prism, made of clay compacts and slats of wood. The Suit informed us that it was called an “artist’s studio apartment”, and it was essentially a place in which someone could avoid meaningfulness indefinitely, through some mysterious and long abandoned power source about which modern people can only speculate (or scentulate, or indeed, exocogitate (in our drag-noggins (yes, the little balls we drag behind us are brains (yes, we use those brains for abstract contemplation to allow the chestbrains to focus mainly on quantum sudoku and kissing lamps… beautiful.. beautiful lamps)))). We scrabbled around for any implements or instruments that might aid us in the barely historic time, at the dawn of civilization. We found numerous lutes, though of a different design, and large electric devices which, after a brief and unhappy experiment, turned out to amplify the lute’s sound. There were pigments applied to stretched fabric surfaces hung on the walls. Most of them appeared to depict the mating of the color-shapes of Infantilix Prime, the world created by the lowest and most basic level of thought in the universe. ALso known as the abstract art planet, for obvious reasons. Also known, separately, and by people who are more fashionable and thus unwilling to talk to those first people, as self delusion prime, and never-gonna-be prime.

In a hurry, we barely noticed that the Galgravolt was already beginning to lose his sedan shape, and was reverting to the sleek, quadrupedal, shimmering black, almost feline tautness of the great beast he would become. We had but little time. The suit demonstrated the sorts of things we might need. We found a leather flap in which were stored rectangles of plastic and longer rectangles of paper with pictures of sailors on them. Or monarchs. We couldn’t tell without consulting ourselves. Those in hand, and in limb, and in flap and tentacle, we ran and slithered out of the room, into a grimly lit hallway, towards a conveyance meant to dis-elevate us to a level commensurate with the ground’s lowly stature.

“We’re no clams!” we celebrated, but before we raggled into the outside zone, the suit itself devolved upon us various administrative duties we had shirked. Apparently, my appearance was such that, like a friend without caps, i would scare everyone. Without the energy to protest, i submitted to a brief and painful procedure whereby i was scanned with a dildonic probe, repeatedly, and though quite brutally, somewhat pleasurably. My bodyfacts quantized, it was then to find a model by which i could be reformed.

“What of my senses? These men have no sensory organs, just a little hole to smell and barely any anuses.” i inquired.

‘And indeed, the anuses of this age dont’ even possess precognition, or toothed feelers.” my companion added.

“No feelers? No precognition? How do you know what your poo will feel like when running across toothed feelers before it runs across toothed feelers/ how can you plan your days?”

“You’ll ahve to get used to it.”

“what about the rest of my stuff. The smellers ad feelers and blurters and eaters and lickers and things?”

“The Suit says that they can be disguised. You’ll still possess them, but they wont’ be visible to the average human of the era.”

All that remained, again, was to find a model, an example of what i should look like. As if delivered by fate, an image of an ordinary man appeared on some flickering image box hanging in the lobby of the building.

The rays struck me, the metal dehyperincoagulators, the vonts, and the post-Cambrian devices. Over and over i was shattered and reassembled, my consciousness careening from the sheer sense of pure existence to the non sense of the bodiless incorporeal vapor to which i was reduced, over and over, through each phase of my transformation. Finally, when it should seem i could take no more, I was released. My … legs.. below me wobbled. My head elevated almost a full five feet in the air contained, i felt by… hands? two wet orbs, eyes! eyes! yet i could not use them. I could not see. Fortunately, a quick instinctual out-gassing of observaton particles demonstrated that my usual arsenal of obscure and ever shifting sensory organs was functioning to their fullest extent. I was, clothed in what i can only describe as jeans and a shirt, fully and utterly the image of one Michael J Fox. Yet who was this Michael? Would it matter?

Would it matter?

to be continued….