Writer's anyone?

[Aka_Neo]

this is a writers forum....not a forum for ppl to be quarreling about if they are a homosexual or not ...so please stop quarreling and start back posting some good stories.                    

[Anonymous]

oh shut up                    

[Chaos]

The Rat

        The night after his divorce, he could not sleep in the bedroom. He was sure the bedroom was full of spiders. Soft, wet spiders. Their feet were quieter than kisses. But kissing was not what they had in mind.
        In the end, he spread a blanket on the floor of the living room, and slept there. There was something comforting in a little spartan hardship. Self-punishment eased his soul and allowed him to slip into dreams.
        It was water which woke him.
        Water, dripping.
        Drip drop drop.
        The roof was leaking?
        No.
        It wasn't raining. Instead, the night was totally quiet. So quiet that he could hear the faint hiss of static in his ears. And the irregular water sounds coming from the bathroom.
        "Who's there?"
        After speaking, he felt foolish. Nobody's there. You're on your own. She won't be coming back. Anyway. Get up and turn off the tap.
        He walked into the bathroom and turned on the light. As usual, his laundry was soaking in the bathtub. Socks, underpants, business shirts, T-shirts. And something big and brown and mobile which he could not at first identify.
        It was a rat. A huge rat. Unable to climb the sheer enameled sides of the bathtub, unable to jump out because the water was too deep for it to find a footing, it was patiently swimming around and around, making very faint swimming sounds as it did so.
        It was going to jump. He was sure. Jump at his face. He grabbed a bath towel and hit it. Water slapped upwards and skidded through the air. Soon the towel was wet and heavy. A weapon. The rat was rolling in a mist of red. The red was dirty, contaminated by the filth of a rat. At last he realized that it was dead, and had been dead for some time.
        He made himself a cup of black coffee and drank it, slowly. He thought about phoning her, but did not. It was, after all, three o'clock in the morning.
        Despite the coffee, sleep came easily. After he got back to sleep, he dreamt of cockroach eggs. They were vividly orange, like flying fish roe. He poured boiling water over the eggs. No children, no. I refuse. As the boiling water spread, a huge swollen cockroach crept out from under the oven.
        "Daddy?" it said.
        He stepped on it. Its lacquered brown carapace broke beneath his foot. Then his face broke, and he wept.
        He was still weeping, helplessly, when he woke.


*


        Years later, he still remembered putting on gloves to handle the rat's corpse. The body had been stiff and heavy after floating for hours in the water. He remembered that very clearly. But he found he could not remember what he had done with the laundry. He certainly had not thrown anything away. He was not the kind of person who threw things away. Somehow, he must have recovered his clothes from their dilute bath of blood and excrement. Maybe he was wearing them now. Yes, maybe. His clothes always lasted longer than his relationships.                    

[Aka_Neo]

oh shut up

oh shut up my @$$ cuz u  well know that this is not a homosexual talk thread but it is a writers forum...rampage yuh have anything to say..dem men only talkin bout this one is a homo and this one is not.tell them make their own thread and talk bout them thing cuz i know this is a writers forum not a homo talk place                    

[Chaos]

Warning...the following may be disturbing to some.......be warned.

The Kidney Bean Diet


      Something was happening next door. Though Mavis Sempith believed in keeping herself to herself, it was impossible to ignore the raucous music, the manic laughter and the repeated sounds of smashing glass.
         "Maybe we should call someone," said Mavis.
         "He's a young man, isn't he?" said Trevor, meaning their neighbor's, the church-going civil servant they knew as Nick Wolvine.
         Then, as if an argument had just been settled very much to his satisfaction, Trevor returned to his newspaper.
         From next door, the sound of a window smashing. Mavis twitched the curtain aside. A dishwater blonde with bloodstreaked hair was screaming to the night:
         "Help me! Help me!"
         Trevor was still reading his newspaper, engrossed in a review of Mozart's Requiem.
         "Trevor ...."
         "Mmm?"
         "There's something not quite right. Next door."
         From next door came a succession of piteous, uncontrollable, agonizing screams. Irritated, Trevor flicked the curtain aside, and immediately saw the video playing on the TV in the living room opposite. A man was shoveling a broken bottle into a woman's stomach, and apparently she was not enjoying it. Trevor frowned. Not quite his cup of tea.
         "Just a video, darling," said Trevor.
         "No, Trevor, actually it's not. There was this woman, she was positively hanging out of the window."
         "That was your imagination," said Trevor positively.
         He was an accountant. He knew about such things.
         Ready to dispute this, Mavis Sempith came to the window. Her new spectacles gave her immaculate eyesight. On the TV screen opposite, she could plainly see the dishwater blonde whom she had noticed earlier. Without a doubt, they were one and the same person.
         "But she was hanging out of the window," said Mavis. "And - look, the window really is broken!"
         "Yes, well, I expect they've been having some sort of party," said Trevor vaguely. "But if she's on video she can't have been hanging out of the window, can she, now?"
         "The thing is," said Mavis, "she's still screaming. If she keeps it up, someone will call the police."
         True. So Trevor made a phone call.
         "Is that Mr Wolvine? Yes, this is Trevor Sempith. I don't think we've met. Who? Oh, I'm your next door neighbor's. It's about the, uh, video, actually. I don't wish to seem ... Oh, you will, will you? ... Well, yes, yes. It's the wife, actually. She's rather sensitive to loud noises."
         Problem solved. As Mavis watched, the TV showed a large hammer - it looked like one of those sledgehammer thing workmen use for breaking up concrete - descend upon the blonde's head. Bringing an abrupt silence.
         "Those special effects," said Mavis, shaking her head as she let the curtain fall into place.
         Trevor had already returned to his newspaper. And Mavis went to the fridge and got herself another bowl of kidney beans. She was on the kidney bean diet, which permits you to eat anything you want on the odd-numbered days of the month providing you eat nothing but kidney beans on the even-numbered days.
         The next day, Mavis was fine, but Trevor felt uneasy. Something was nagging at him. He could not quite pin it down except that it had something to do with houses. Or a house.
         "Why don't we take a holiday in Glasgow?"
         "Glasgow?" said Trevor. "But we don't know anyone in Glasgow."
         "I meant a proper holiday," said Mavis. "Not a seeing people holiday. You know. Some people go to Monte Carlo, some people go to Majorca. We could go to Glasgow."
         "We could also go to Timbuktu," said Trevor, spreading more marmalade on his toast. "What would you want to go to Glasgow for?"
         "I don't know," said Mavis vaguely. "It just seemed like a good thing to do."
         Trevor snorted, then looked at his watch and realized he was already two minutes behind schedule. Time to leave for work.
         When Trevor returned that evening, his neighbor's, Nick Wolvine, was doing a spot of car-cleaning. His car looked as if someone had spilt red paint inside it. The red paint had splashed all over the place. It was mixed together with scraps of torn cloth and the oddest pieces of fur. Looking at it, Trevor had the most peculiarly unpleasant vision of a bottle of carbonated drink exploding inside a fox.
         "Doing a bit of car-cleaning, are we?" said Trevor.
         "Yes," said Nick, smiling in a blandly professional way, like a dentist promising you it won't hurt.
         Truth was, Trevor didn't like him. That video nasty business. Still. That's what the world's come to, isn't it? And, give the fellow his due, he's a nice enough chap. At least he doesn't have a dog. Or a pack of dogs, like the last lot.
         Inside the house, a ragged letter from Mavis, scrawled in an unnaturally chaotic hand and left on the table.
         "Goodbye, Trevor. I've gone to Glasgow. Won't be back."
         "Well, this isn't very convenient, is it?" said Trevor. "What am I going to do for dinner?"
         Then he remembered the pizza home delivery service. He would have tried it before, but Mavis had always disapproved. With a delicious sense of daring - this was quite Bohemian! - Trevor picked up the phone and dialed.
         "Somebody screaming?" said the pizza boy, frowning.
         "Just the neighbor's's video," said Trevor, who hadn't been paying it much attention.
         Half an hour later, though, he did sit up smartly when he heard Mavis screaming his name.
         "Trevor! Trevor! Help me!"
         Drawing the curtains boldly aside, Trevor looked straight into Nick's living room and, without much surprise, observed Mavis's bleeding body on display on the video machine.
         So Mavis has become an actress. Well, really. This is about on a par with wanting to go to Glasgow on your holidays.
         "It's right now, Trevor!" shrieked Mavis. "The camera, the camera, he's doing it to me right now!"
         After long years of making sense out of his wife's often disjointed utterances, Trevor was able to see what his wife was getting at. Her words suggested that she was being filmed right now, and that the image of her torture was being piped from the video camera to the TV in the living room.
         Interesting. A metatheatrical effect, of the kind Trevor had studied when doing those Open University courses - the kind of effect you get when the people in the play (or the movie) refer to their own drama. Shakespeare does it a lot. And there's a scene, isn't there, in that movie about seven years - "Seven Years in Tibet", yes, that's the one. In the movie, the actor playing the Dali Lama asks his Austrian associate if anyone will ever make a movie about them. Yes.
         Trevor realized he had been woolgathering. In the interim, Mavis had lost her nose, both eyes and most of her scalp. Amazing what they can do with special effects these days. Some props were now in evidence, ready for the next stage of the drama: a crowbar, a length of barbed wire, and a bottle of something which might have been acid. But Trevor didn't really want to watch.
         "Not really my cup of tea," he said, and went and put on a Shostakovich CD.
         The Shostakovich, however, failed to soothe his sense of distress. To be frank, he felt violated. It was one thing for Mavis to run away and leave him. That he could bear. And, if she chose to go slumming as an actress in a snuff movie flick, that was her business. But to bring his name into it! That was - well, a kind of mockery. Other people would see the movie. And maybe the tabloids would get hold of it, and find out who the real Trevor was, and then what would people say at the office?
         And that Nick. He must have organized all this. Yes. Trevor could see it now. Those video nasties had always held an intense fascination for Mavis. Nick must produce the things. He was a movie producer, he had seduced Mavis away with promises of starlet glory, of Hollywood fame. It was all too much.
         Straight away, Trevor got Nick on the phone.
         "What have you done with my wife?" said Trevor.
         "She's gone to Glasgow," said Nick, nastily. "And you're going with her."
         Then abruptly hung up. When Trevor dialed back, he got an engaged signal. Well, really! So. They were running away together, were they? "I'm going to Glasgow with her" - that's what Nick must have meant.
         Putting on his greatcoat - a much-treasured family heirloom which had first been worn by his great-grandfather in the trenches of Flanders - Trevor set out for one of his rare late-night walks. In extremis, some people got drunk or resorted to drugs, but Trevor liked to walk. It was soothing.
         When he returned at 4 am, the fire brigade was just finishing dousing the ashes of his house. Both Trevor's house and that of his neighbor's, Nick Wolvine, had been burnt to the ground. And the police had some questions to ask.
         Trevor thought of telling them about Mavis and Glasgow, but that was private, wasn't it? You don't go telling the police about your wife's secret affair with a movie producer.
         "You don't seem very worried," said Trevor's burly interrogator, misinterpreting Trevor's dazed fatigue as happy-go-lucky insouciance.
         "Oh, she'll be all right," said Trevor.
         "She?"
         "My wife. She's gone to Glasgow. Visiting friends."
         I mean, you have to give a reason. Nobody would just go to Glasgow. Not unless they had a compelling purpose. Visiting friends, then. Yes, that would serve at the office. And then maybe she could have a ... well, a car accident. Yes. Very sad. Cremated already, and, yes, I am a bit broken up about it all.
         "So she went to Glasgow," said the policeman. "How very convenient."
         "If you want to look on it that way," said Trevor, sensing a subtext, but not quite able to work out what it might be.
         "House was insured, was it?" said the policeman.
         "Of course," said Trevor.
         Then, in horror, he realized what had been nagging at him the other day. The house! He had forgotten to renew the insurance, and it had expired! He said as much.
         "But you didn't know that at the time?" said the policeman.
         "I'd forgotten about it," said Trevor.
         That statement was used in evidence against him in court, and he did six months for arson. By the time he got out of prison, he had lost his job, his savings had been exhausted by legal expenses, and his friends had deserted him.
         All but one.
         Across the road from the prison gate, a car was waiting. Nick Wolvine was leaning against it.
         "Like to see your wife?" said Nick.
         "Whatever," said Trevor, with a shrug - that degraded shrug, an uncouth mannerism the pre-prison Trevor would never have indulged in, a firm proof of exactly how far he had fallen.
         "Then get in," said Nick.
         "Where are we going?" said Trevor, buckling up.
         "Glasgow," said Nick.                    

[Aka_Neo]

I THINK THIS IS A FUNNY STORY


A Day in Hell

One day a guy dies and finds himself in hell. As he is wallowing in despair he has his first meeting with a demon...

Demon: Why so glum  chum?
Guy:  What do you think?  I'm in hell.
Demon:  Hell's not so bad.  We actually have a lot of fun down here...you a drinkin' man?
Guy:  Sure,  I love to drink.  Love the drinks.
Demon:  Well you're gonna love Mondays then.  On  Mondays that's all we do is drink.  Whiskey,  tequila,  Guinness,  wine coolers,  diet tab, and fresca...we drink till we throw up and then we drink some more!
Guy:  Gee that sounds great.

Demon:  You a smoker?
Guy: You better believe it!  Love the smoking.
Demon:  Alright!  You're gonna love Tuesdays.  We get the finest cigars from all over the world and smoke our lungs out.  If you get cancer - no biggie - you're already dead remember?
Guy:  Wow...that's...awesome!

Demon:  I bet you like to gamble.
Guy:  Why  yes  as a matter of fact  I do.  Love the gambling.
Demon:  Cause Wednesday you can gamble all you want.  Craps, Blackjack, Roulette, Poker, Slots, whatever...  If you go Bankrupt...well you're dead anyhow.

Demon:   You into drugs?
Guy:  Are you kidding?  Love drugs! You don't mean...
Demon:  That's right!  Thursday is drug day.  Help yourself to a great big bowl of crack. or smack.  Smoke a doobie the size of a submarine. You can do all the drugs you want and if ya overdose - that's right - you're dead - who cares!  O.D.!!
Guy:  Yowza!  I never realized Hell was such a swingin' place!!

Demon: You gay?
Guy:  Uh  no.

Demon:  Ooooh  (grimaces) you're really gonna hate Fridays.                    

[Babs_Bunnie]

these stories are cool
i love to read them when i drinking JAVA  yum!                    

[Aka_Neo]

Air force one and the farmer

Air Force One crashed in the middle of rural America. Panic stricken, the Secret Service mobilized and descended on the farm in force. When they got there, the wreckage was clear. The aircraft was totally destroyed, with only a burned hulk left smoldering in a tree line that bordered a farm. Secret Service descended upon the smoking hulk but could find no remains of the crew or the President's staff. To their amazement, a lone farmer was plowing a field not too far away as if nothing at all happened. They hurried over to surround the man's actor. "Sir," the senior Secret Service agent asked, panting and out of breath. "Did you see this terrible accident happen?" "Yep. Sure did." The man muttered unconcernedly. "Do you realize that is the President of the United States' airplane?" "Yep." "Were there any survivors?" the agent gasped. "Nope. They's all kilt straight out." The farmer sighed cutting of his tractor motor. "I done buried them all myself. Took most of the morning." "The President of the United States is DEAD?" The agent gulped in disbelief. "Yep, he kept a-saying he wasn't ... but you know what a liar he is!"                    

[androsovic]

Scenario number 1:
BigDog1: Lil dog, we hungry,we not feeling to eat any alpo.we want meat!
BigDog2:Yea for real,if u get food for us,we will give u the food master gives us.
LittleDog:Ok,gameplan,i will organise someone to follow me, and allyuh jump him.Right?
BigDog1:Scene

LittleDOg barks at StupidMailman.
StupidMailman runs after LittleDog
LittleDog:Fellas! He coming!
BIgDog1 and BigDog2 jump at StupidMailman.
StupidMailman dies.

Scenario number 2:
LittleDog is walking by when AngryMc is walking by.
LittleDog rushes AngryMC.
AngryMc runs after LittleDog
BigDog1 and BigDog2 attack AngryMC.AngryMC dies.

Scenario number3:
The Stalk

BigDog1 chases UnsuspectingMann.
UnsuspectingMann runs into alley.
BigDog2 flanks UnsuspectingMann.
UnsuspectingMann dies.

Scenario number 4:

UnsuspectingMann2 leans on gate.
LittleDOg barks at UnsuspectingMann2.
UnsuspectingMann2 gets angry,runs in compund and turns to hit LittleDog.
BigDog1 slams gate shut.
UnsuspectingMann2 dies.                    

[Aka_Neo]

The lexus and the president
A lady bought a new Lexus. Cost a bundle. Two days later, she brought it back complaining that the radio wasn't working. "Madam", said the sales maneger, "the audio system in this car is completly automated. All you need to do is tell it what you want to listen to and you will hear exactly that!" She drives out , somewhat amazed and a little confused. She looked at the radio and said, "Nelson". The radio responded, "Ricky or Willie?" Soon she was speeding down the highway to the sounds of "On the road again". The lady was astounded. If she wanted Beethoven, that's what she got. If she wanted Nat King Cole, she got it. Stopped at an intersection, her light turned green and she pulled out. Off to her right, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a small sports utility vehicle speeding toward her. She swerved and narrowly missed a collision. "Asshole.....", she muttered. And from the radio..... "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States....                    

[ShinIori]

This is my latest song I`ve written.
Its incomplete. The song tells a story that needs to be finished.


"This love such a vice on my distant mind,
The cold kiss from her cherub lips,
Is driving me insanely blind,
Starlight ivory feels frozen in her gaze,
This blaze,
Blaze of destiny,
Haze of destruction,

Striking like lightning from her frostbitten tongue,
I sought after the gift of the mystical sun,
Beauty ahead by the pharoah`s last words,
She tilted my dream as if she was controlled,
Though many have wondered how long have I slept,
I break through the night like a dark silouhette,
And the temple the Pharoah had built for his rest,
Was burnt to the ground by the flaring sunset,

She whispered the ravens burnt by the hellfire,
While my twisted outlook may be all but divine,

Shunning the storm,
It just seems to be gone,
The truth still stings me like poisonous thorns,
In the wake of my bride,
She was hounded by pride,
For the lisp of the dogmas kept building by right,

Her touch was encased by a holy black light,
I longed to hold her though I`ll be burned by desire,

Why?
Why is it that heaven keeps us far apart,
Are they jealous I`m trying to patch up my heart,
Restless parting,
I am drowning,

I`m Coldsweating tears as I`m lost in her eyes,
We stand there and stare as the hours pass by,
She then weeps like a rose after soft midnight dew,
As the glistening moon shines from great altitudes "

Thats all I did for now.
Please do tell what you think.                    

[CrashKid]

I'am not that good with this poem or writer thing but i'am giving it a try so don't laugh

I am a lion
King of the jungle
When hit people they tumble
With my sharp and vicious teeth
Men ran quick on thier feet
When give a loud roar
I shake the entire floor
Don't try to hide
Cause i am a lion and i will be right behind
I am vicious
Don't run you will make me cuss
Don't get me mad
Cause when i get you be very sad
I have the power of Gods
More powerful then the Lords
So you better look out
Cause in the jungle i am all about

                                          so what u guys think?                    

[Evangelion_01]

More submissions. Good. Thought this thread was dead.

Not too bad there Crash~, but it seems you need some vocabulary expansion. A thesaurus would help you some.

Shin~: We need a title for that piece of art man. A titles' needed to compliment the work.

More originals needed. Still working on my project.                    

[ShinIori]

Its called "The love that can never be".                    

[Chaos]

soundin like tabanca ting shin...........                    

[Chaos]

Golf Course


        Perry Voight woke to find himself lying atop a small grassy hill from where he had a view over a very large golf course. Hole after hole, the golf course stretched away in all directions, reaching to the far horizon. According to his watch, the time was 6.17, and the dewy cool of the clean and scentless air suggested it was 6.17 in the morning. The sun was just rising.
         "Uh huh," said Perry.
         He had a very clear memory of having been put to death by lethal injection for the murder of his wife. In fact, Perry had not killed his beloved Daphne, nor did he know who had. But he was fairly sure that he himself was dead.
         "So this is ....?"
         Where? Heaven, possibly. Emerald greens stretching away forever. Little lakes of limpidly clear water. Here and there, occasional buildings looking clean and bright in the sunlight.
         But his conscience was not clear enough for heaven. He had done some pretty ugly things in his time. Hell, then? Hell - no, he couldn't really see it. For a start, he had been genuinely repentant for his major sins. And, besides, as a fairly traditional, conservative guy, he couldn't square this endless golf course with any possible vision of hell.
         "Limbo, then," he decided.
         Limbo was for - for what? Was for the indifferent. Those too limply indecisive to be either good or bad. Those who had sleepwalked through life. But that didn't fit his own case, surely. Purgatory, then. The place where you atoned through suffering before going on to heaven. But suffering required - well, racks and whips and burning coals, that kind of stuff.
         "It's the opening credits," said Perry, deciding. "The movie will start shortly, right?"
         That made as much sense as anything. So he started downhill toward the nearest building, a silvery pavilion which sat beside a little lake. Thousands of orange birds were floating on the lake. And, when Perry got down to the water, he found the birds were plastic ducks. Pretty cute ducks, if you liked that kind of thing.
         "Limbo," said Perry, deciding.
         Heaven would have had real ducks, and shotguns to allow a guy the chance to shoot them dead. And there wouldn't have been anything cute in hell.
         Inside the pavilion, there were dozens of cast iron tables, painted white, with precisely four lime-green plastic chairs at each table. The place was utterly deserted. A row of vending machines hummed faintly. They sold soft drinks, icecream, candy bars with familiar brand names, and newspapers. Unfortunately, Perry had no money. Frustrated, he punched one of the machines. A can of drink fell out.
         "You could have just asked," said the machine.
         "Okay," said Perry. "Give me. Please."
         "Give you what?"
         "Another can of the same. Thank you! Yeah, and you, some of that stuff. Yeah, and I'll have the newspaper. Thanks. And while we're at it - what place is this? I mean, you know, where does it fit in the, uh, heaven-hell spectrum?"
         "Are you talking to me?" said one of the machines.
         "Yes," said Perry.
         "You must be nuts, then," said the machine. "I'm not a theologian, I'm a vending machine."
         Well, that kind of confirms it, doesn't it? If you end up in a place where the vending machines talk about theology, you must be dead. Right? I guess.
         While eating, Perry became aware that his bad tooth was still bad. Death, apparently, was no substitute for dentistry. This was not going to be much fun if he was going to have to eat on one side of his mouth for the rest of eternity. Definitely not heaven, then. In heaven, you got a full suite of medical benefits. Yeah, and a harp, and your own cloud, and all that good stuff.
         Over his sugary, less than entirely satisfactory breakfast, Perry read through his newspaper, which was The Golf Course Times. Apparently the date was the fourth of July in the year Seven Tango Pineapple Blue. The news was rather like the breakfast: less than entirely satisfactory. "Tangerine Eclipse Percolated by Tea Leaf Bicycle." "Three Dead in Chicago Fire." "Small Earthquake In Peru - Not Many Dead."
         Perry was reading a piece about the recent completion of the Great Pyramid of Cheops when a coughing clanking grumbling cacophony announced the approach of someone big and heavy. Turning, Perry saw a big guy coming toward him. The guy had the height of a basketball star and the bulk of a Japanese sumo wrestler. The guy, whoever he was, was green as a frog, and naked but for a gold watch and a bright orange penis sheath. His green skin was that of a crocodile and his teeth were that of a shark. There was a thin thread of blood leaking from one of his swollen nostrils. Slung over his shoulder was a huge leather bag filled with a clattering collection of golf clubs.
         "God," muttered Perry.
         "Midrog Shablash, sir," said the green entity, halting in front of him. "Midrog Shablash, at your service."
         "Uh."
         "Well. You want to start?"
         "Start?"
         "Golf."
         "Uh, well," said Perry.
         It's a trick. You answer in the affirmative and he hauls out one of those clubs and starts breaking your teeth. Right?
         "Well?" said Midrog.
         "Tell the truth," said Perry, "to tell the truth, what I'd really like is to see a dentist."
         "A dentist?" said Midrog. "What's a dentist?"
         "A tooth doctor," said Perry.
         "Doctor?"
         "Someone who repairs teeth."
         "Oh, we don't have anyone like that," said Midrog. "Not here in Golf Course."
         "In where?"
         "Golf Course."
         "And where's that?" said Perry. "I mean, is it, uh, you know, like, uh, something like hell? Or more like limbo?"
         "Golf Course is Golf Course," said Midrog impatiently. "And I'm your caddy. You want to play golf or not?"
         "What's the alternative?"
         "The alternative to playing golf is not playing golf."
         "Am I making a permanent choice here?" said Perry cautiously.
         "Look, mac," said Midrog. "I'm a caddy. Got that? A caddy, pure and simple. You want to play golf, you play. You don't, you do whatever. It's all one to me."
         "So what exactly is there to do?" said Perry. "Besides play golf, I mean."
         "That's over to you, isn't it?" said Midrog. "This is Golf Course, not Disneyland. We don't have a big range of attractions."
         "So ... do you have any suggestions?"
         "Sure. You could pull your rod, or dig up the greens, or go bury your head in a sand trap, or spend the day breaking windows, or make a bow and arrow and go shoot some plastic ducks. It's a free country, mac."
         "Okay," said Perry. "I'll play golf."
         His golf had been indifferent in his former life, and it was equally as indifferent in Golf Course. His bad tooth occasionally niggled and griped, much as it had during the final weeks of his jailhouse existence. Occasionally, he was troubled by the faintest twinge of arthritic protest from his right hip, just as in real life. But his stamina had improved. In fact, he played all day without the slightest sense of strain or physical fatigue. And without eating, or needing to visit the bathroom.
         It was only toward evening that Perry truly began to get tired.
         "I want to stop," he said.
         "Fine," said Midrog. "Whatever you say. There's a hotel over there."
         And so there was. A white marble hotel adorned with a sign which said "Splendid's White Marble Golf Course Hotel."
         "I don't have any money."
         "Your credit's good."
         "You mean I get a bill?"
         "I was using one of those atom-splitting radioactive billfolds," said Midrog.
         "One of those what?"
         "Metaphors," said Midrog, correcting himself. "A metaphor. You can have what you want. The presidential suite, hot and cold running call girls, cable TV with 76 different porno channels, you name it."
         And he was right. Not that it was perfect. In the hotel, the beds were too soft, the restaurant served nothing but plain rice and fried chicken, the liquor was too watery to get drunk on, the call girls were all in their late 40s, and the stuff on the porno channels was blurred and out of focus. But, compared to prison, it wasn't too bad. And, for a guy who was dead, Perry Voight didn't think he was doing too badly.
         That evening, when Perry was relaxing in the lobby with a martini, Daphne entered the hotel.
         "Daphne!" said Perry, so surprised that he spilt his drink as he stood. "Daphne," he said, staring at his wife. "What are you doing here?"
         "I'm doing a survey," said Daphne.
         "What happened?" said Perry. "Who killed you?"
         "Which do you prefer," said Daphne. "Cigarettes or cigarillos?"
         "You know I don't smoke," said Perry, who was so innocent of the smoking habit that he didn't even know what a cigarillo might be, or even if it was a real thing.
         "Of course you don't smoke," said Daphne. "You were always too busy playing golf, weren't you?"
         "Is that meant as a criticism?" said Perry.
         "Finish the survey, and I might have time to tell you," said Daphne. "Next question. How many cigars do you smoke a day?"
         "Daphne - "
         "Do you want to do this survey or not?" said Daphne. "It's entirely voluntary, you know."
         "Then let's skip it," said Perry.
         "Fine," said Daphne, and promptly turned into a cloud of malarial mosquitos, one of which flew into Perry's ear as the rest scattered and vanished.
         It took Perry most of the rest of the evening to get rid of the mosquito in his ear. (He finally had to drown it by filling his ear with warm olive oil.) By the time he finally got to bed, he was totally exhausted. And, at first, he slept with the dreamless intensity of a piece of fossilized bone.
         Then he was woken at three a.m. by screaming from across the room across the hall. Perry got out of bed, pulled on his shorts and stumbled to the phone. He picked up the phone and tried to call the front desk, only to find the phone was dead. The screaming was getting worse and worse - an incoherent onslaught of uncontainable agony.
         "The hell," said Perry, deciding.
         He threw open his door and stepped out into the hall. As he did so, the screaming abruptly stopped. There was no sound in the corridor but for the hush of the air conditioning and a faint hum from the ice machine down the hall. Perry tried the door of the room opposite his own. The door opened.
         Inside, a suite like his own. Nailed upside down to the wall, a man. A dead man. His throat had been cut. There was blood all over the suite. The man's swollen stomach was knotting and unknotting. Then a green snake bulged out of the gashed wound in the corpse's throat and, in one prolonged disgorging heave, flowed forth. Slick with blood, it slithered down to the floor, then vanished into the indecipherable shadows of the bathroom. The dead man's stomach was now flaccid, empty.
         "Help!" yelled Perry. "Help! Call the police! Help help help!"
         But there was no response. And, running through the hotel in his shorts, Perry found the whole place deserted. But for the caddy, Midrog Shablash, who was asleep on a couch in the foyer.
         "The hell?" said Midrog, woken from sleep. "Look, mac, it's three in the morning. You want to play golf, fine. But I don't get going till the sun comes up. Union rules."
         "I'm trying to tell you," said Perry. "There's this dead man."
         "Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time," said Midrog. "Hey. Shit happens. Go back to sleep."
         "Sleep? After what happens?"
         "Hey. Morning, I'll get you partnered up with Al Treeve. He's been here a while. You can play a few rounds, he can tell you a few things."
         But sleep was impossible. Instead, Perry took two bottles of watery gin from one of the bars, and went outside, where he spent the rest of the night sitting on a sand trap trying unsuccessfully to get drunk.
         "No substance abuse possible," explained Al Treeve, the next day. "Believe me, I've tried."
         "So how long have you been here?" said Perry, as he teed up.
         "About that long," said Al, accepting a golf ball from his caddy. "Long enough to earn old timer privileges."
         "Such as?"
         "Special golf balls, for one. Like this here Sinner Special."
         "This what?"
         "This," said Al, with a big grin.
         A curious thing. A sphere, golf-ball dimpled but clear. Inside, a naked man and a naked woman. And a porcupine.
         "They look in pretty good shape," said Perry, for want of anything intelligent to say.
         "Sure. Regeneration. Smack! Whack! Trauma ward special. Then they get fixed up."
         Inside the golf ball, the man and the woman sat slumped, listless. The porcupine was not moving. Experimentally, Perry shook the golf ball. Throwing the scene into screaming spasm.
         "Jesus!" said Perry, shocked at his callous error.
         "That's nothing," said Al with a chuckle. "Why, once I hit this sucker so hard both their heads came off."
         "That's possible?" said Perry.
         "Here? Sure. Anything's possible here."
         "Doesn't this ... worry you? At all?"
         "You some kinda atheist communist or something?" said Al, turning surly. "These are sinners."
         Atheist communist. A tad old-fashioned.
         "How long have you been here?" said Perry.
         "Oh, since ... 1958, I guess. Yeah. That was it. 1958."
         "This is sick," said Perry, peering into the bloodstained interior of the Sinner Special golf ball, where the man, the woman and the porcupine lay in a groaning heap.
         "You were right," said Al, to Midrog. "He doesn't fit in." Then, to Perry: "You know your problem? You expect things to make sense."
         "Of course."
         "But they don't," said Al. "So get used to it."
         "I don't think I can," said Perry.
         "Well, then," said Al, and clubbed him, knocking him down.
         "What did you do that for?" said Perry, looking up from the ground, too shocked to really feel pain.
         "It's my little hobby," said Al. "Nice knowing you, Perry."
         Then Al Treeve whacked Perry Voight in the head, killing him outright.
         When Perry came to, he was lying in a concrete car park. A big one. It went on for miles. But there were no cars in sight. Off to his right was a golf course. Not a very nice one - it was a hot and shadeless glaring place with withered grass and stunted trees. Even so, some golfers were playing on it.
         "So where's this?" said Perry, to himself.
         "Thermostat," said one of the parking meters, answering him.
         "You speak English?" said Perry.
         "Sure I do," said the parking meter.
         "Then - where is this?"
         "I just told you."
         "No you didn't."
         "Yes I did. It's Thermostat."
         "That's a place?"
         "Yeah, sure. Basic theology. There's Cold Spaghetti, Alarm Clocks, Twisted Rodents and Thermostat. Oh, and Frozen Chocolate, too, let's not forget about Frozen Chocolate."
         "And Golf Course?" said Perry.
         "Yeah, you're right, there's Golf Course. I was forgetting Golf Course. But this is Thermostat."
         "And they have golf here ....?"
         "Oh, they have golf everywhere. Even in Japan."
         Even in Japan. Same pattern. Grown men, little white balls. The men chase the balls. They hit them. The balls run away. The balls don't run far enough. The men see where the balls have fallen. They follow their quarry, meaning to hit again.
         Off in the distance, Perry saw a woman talking to a couple of golfers. Maybe it was Daphne. Doing a survey? Maybe. Well. Maybe if you finally listened to her for once ....
         "The American spirit of optimism will not be quenched even by death," said the parking meter, as if reading his mind.
         "Hell, no," said Perry. "It won't. And why should it?"
         And, without waiting for an answer, he set off, his mind set for once on winning the woman rather than on teeing off.


The End                    

[androsovic]

if he stop going on people msn and talking sh!t then he mightnt have tabanca                    

[Chaos]

Golf Course


        Perry Voight woke to find himself lying atop a small grassy hill from where he had a view over a very large golf course. Hole after hole, the golf course stretched away in all directions, reaching to the far horizon. According to his watch, the time was 6.17, and the dewy cool of the clean and scentless air suggested it was 6.17 in the morning. The sun was just rising.
         "Uh huh," said Perry.
         He had a very clear memory of having been put to death by lethal injection for the murder of his wife. In fact, Perry had not killed his beloved Daphne, nor did he know who had. But he was fairly sure that he himself was dead.
         "So this is ....?"
         Where? Heaven, possibly. Emerald greens stretching away forever. Little lakes of limpidly clear water. Here and there, occasional buildings looking clean and bright in the sunlight.
         But his conscience was not clear enough for heaven. He had done some pretty ugly things in his time. Hell, then? Hell - no, he couldn't really see it. For a start, he had been genuinely repentant for his major sins. And, besides, as a fairly traditional, conservative guy, he couldn't square this endless golf course with any possible vision of hell.
         "Limbo, then," he decided.
         Limbo was for - for what? Was for the indifferent. Those too limply indecisive to be either good or bad. Those who had sleepwalked through life. But that didn't fit his own case, surely. Purgatory, then. The place where you atoned through suffering before going on to heaven. But suffering required - well, racks and whips and burning coals, that kind of stuff.
         "It's the opening credits," said Perry, deciding. "The movie will start shortly, right?"
         That made as much sense as anything. So he started downhill toward the nearest building, a silvery pavilion which sat beside a little lake. Thousands of orange birds were floating on the lake. And, when Perry got down to the water, he found the birds were plastic ducks. Pretty cute ducks, if you liked that kind of thing.
         "Limbo," said Perry, deciding.
         Heaven would have had real ducks, and shotguns to allow a guy the chance to shoot them dead. And there wouldn't have been anything cute in hell.
         Inside the pavilion, there were dozens of cast iron tables, painted white, with precisely four lime-green plastic chairs at each table. The place was utterly deserted. A row of vending machines hummed faintly. They sold soft drinks, icecream, candy bars with familiar brand names, and newspapers. Unfortunately, Perry had no money. Frustrated, he punched one of the machines. A can of drink fell out.
         "You could have just asked," said the machine.
         "Okay," said Perry. "Give me. Please."
         "Give you what?"
         "Another can of the same. Thank you! Yeah, and you, some of that stuff. Yeah, and I'll have the newspaper. Thanks. And while we're at it - what place is this? I mean, you know, where does it fit in the, uh, heaven-hell spectrum?"
         "Are you talking to me?" said one of the machines.
         "Yes," said Perry.
         "You must be nuts, then," said the machine. "I'm not a theologian, I'm a vending machine."
         Well, that kind of confirms it, doesn't it? If you end up in a place where the vending machines talk about theology, you must be dead. Right? I guess.
         While eating, Perry became aware that his bad tooth was still bad. Death, apparently, was no substitute for dentistry. This was not going to be much fun if he was going to have to eat on one side of his mouth for the rest of eternity. Definitely not heaven, then. In heaven, you got a full suite of medical benefits. Yeah, and a harp, and your own cloud, and all that good stuff.
         Over his sugary, less than entirely satisfactory breakfast, Perry read through his newspaper, which was The Golf Course Times. Apparently the date was the fourth of July in the year Seven Tango Pineapple Blue. The news was rather like the breakfast: less than entirely satisfactory. "Tangerine Eclipse Percolated by Tea Leaf Bicycle." "Three Dead in Chicago Fire." "Small Earthquake In Peru - Not Many Dead."
         Perry was reading a piece about the recent completion of the Great Pyramid of Cheops when a coughing clanking grumbling cacophony announced the approach of someone big and heavy. Turning, Perry saw a big guy coming toward him. The guy had the height of a basketball star and the bulk of a Japanese sumo wrestler. The guy, whoever he was, was green as a frog, and naked but for a gold watch and a bright orange penis sheath. His green skin was that of a crocodile and his teeth were that of a shark. There was a thin thread of blood leaking from one of his swollen nostrils. Slung over his shoulder was a huge leather bag filled with a clattering collection of golf clubs.
         "God," muttered Perry.
         "Midrog Shablash, sir," said the green entity, halting in front of him. "Midrog Shablash, at your service."
         "Uh."
         "Well. You want to start?"
         "Start?"
         "Golf."
         "Uh, well," said Perry.
         It's a trick. You answer in the affirmative and he hauls out one of those clubs and starts breaking your teeth. Right?
         "Well?" said Midrog.
         "Tell the truth," said Perry, "to tell the truth, what I'd really like is to see a dentist."
         "A dentist?" said Midrog. "What's a dentist?"
         "A tooth doctor," said Perry.
         "Doctor?"
         "Someone who repairs teeth."
         "Oh, we don't have anyone like that," said Midrog. "Not here in Golf Course."
         "In where?"
         "Golf Course."
         "And where's that?" said Perry. "I mean, is it, uh, you know, like, uh, something like hell? Or more like limbo?"
         "Golf Course is Golf Course," said Midrog impatiently. "And I'm your caddy. You want to play golf or not?"
         "What's the alternative?"
         "The alternative to playing golf is not playing golf."
         "Am I making a permanent choice here?" said Perry cautiously.
         "Look, mac," said Midrog. "I'm a caddy. Got that? A caddy, pure and simple. You want to play golf, you play. You don't, you do whatever. It's all one to me."
         "So what exactly is there to do?" said Perry. "Besides play golf, I mean."
         "That's over to you, isn't it?" said Midrog. "This is Golf Course, not Disneyland. We don't have a big range of attractions."
         "So ... do you have any suggestions?"
         "Sure. You could pull your rod, or dig up the greens, or go bury your head in a sand trap, or spend the day breaking windows, or make a bow and arrow and go shoot some plastic ducks. It's a free country, mac."
         "Okay," said Perry. "I'll play golf."
         His golf had been indifferent in his former life, and it was equally as indifferent in Golf Course. His bad tooth occasionally niggled and griped, much as it had during the final weeks of his jailhouse existence. Occasionally, he was troubled by the faintest twinge of arthritic protest from his right hip, just as in real life. But his stamina had improved. In fact, he played all day without the slightest sense of strain or physical fatigue. And without eating, or needing to visit the bathroom.
         It was only toward evening that Perry truly began to get tired.
         "I want to stop," he said.
         "Fine," said Midrog. "Whatever you say. There's a hotel over there."
         And so there was. A white marble hotel adorned with a sign which said "Splendid's White Marble Golf Course Hotel."
         "I don't have any money."
         "Your credit's good."
         "You mean I get a bill?"
         "I was using one of those atom-splitting radioactive billfolds," said Midrog.
         "One of those what?"
         "Metaphors," said Midrog, correcting himself. "A metaphor. You can have what you want. The presidential suite, hot and cold running call girls, cable TV with 76 different porno channels, you name it."
         And he was right. Not that it was perfect. In the hotel, the beds were too soft, the restaurant served nothing but plain rice and fried chicken, the liquor was too watery to get drunk on, the call girls were all in their late 40s, and the stuff on the porno channels was blurred and out of focus. But, compared to prison, it wasn't too bad. And, for a guy who was dead, Perry Voight didn't think he was doing too badly.
         That evening, when Perry was relaxing in the lobby with a martini, Daphne entered the hotel.
         "Daphne!" said Perry, so surprised that he spilt his drink as he stood. "Daphne," he said, staring at his wife. "What are you doing here?"
         "I'm doing a survey," said Daphne.
         "What happened?" said Perry. "Who killed you?"
         "Which do you prefer," said Daphne. "Cigarettes or cigarillos?"
         "You know I don't smoke," said Perry, who was so innocent of the smoking habit that he didn't even know what a cigarillo might be, or even if it was a real thing.
         "Of course you don't smoke," said Daphne. "You were always too busy playing golf, weren't you?"
         "Is that meant as a criticism?" said Perry.
         "Finish the survey, and I might have time to tell you," said Daphne. "Next question. How many cigars do you smoke a day?"
         "Daphne - "
         "Do you want to do this survey or not?" said Daphne. "It's entirely voluntary, you know."
         "Then let's skip it," said Perry.
         "Fine," said Daphne, and promptly turned into a cloud of malarial mosquitos, one of which flew into Perry's ear as the rest scattered and vanished.
         It took Perry most of the rest of the evening to get rid of the mosquito in his ear. (He finally had to drown it by filling his ear with warm olive oil.) By the time he finally got to bed, he was totally exhausted. And, at first, he slept with the dreamless intensity of a piece of fossilized bone.
         Then he was woken at three a.m. by screaming from across the room across the hall. Perry got out of bed, pulled on his shorts and stumbled to the phone. He picked up the phone and tried to call the front desk, only to find the phone was dead. The screaming was getting worse and worse - an incoherent onslaught of uncontainable agony.
         "The hell," said Perry, deciding.
         He threw open his door and stepped out into the hall. As he did so, the screaming abruptly stopped. There was no sound in the corridor but for the hush of the air conditioning and a faint hum from the ice machine down the hall. Perry tried the door of the room opposite his own. The door opened.
         Inside, a suite like his own. Nailed upside down to the wall, a man. A dead man. His throat had been cut. There was blood all over the suite. The man's swollen stomach was knotting and unknotting. Then a green snake bulged out of the gashed wound in the corpse's throat and, in one prolonged disgorging heave, flowed forth. Slick with blood, it slithered down to the floor, then vanished into the indecipherable shadows of the bathroom. The dead man's stomach was now flaccid, empty.
         "Help!" yelled Perry. "Help! Call the police! Help help help!"
         But there was no response. And, running through the hotel in his shorts, Perry found the whole place deserted. But for the caddy, Midrog Shablash, who was asleep on a couch in the foyer.
         "The hell?" said Midrog, woken from sleep. "Look, mac, it's three in the morning. You want to play golf, fine. But I don't get going till the sun comes up. Union rules."
         "I'm trying to tell you," said Perry. "There's this dead man."
         "Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time," said Midrog. "Hey. Shit happens. Go back to sleep."
         "Sleep? After what happens?"
         "Hey. Morning, I'll get you partnered up with Al Treeve. He's been here a while. You can play a few rounds, he can tell you a few things."
         But sleep was impossible. Instead, Perry took two bottles of watery gin from one of the bars, and went outside, where he spent the rest of the night sitting on a sand trap trying unsuccessfully to get drunk.
         "No substance abuse possible," explained Al Treeve, the next day. "Believe me, I've tried."
         "So how long have you been here?" said Perry, as he teed up.
         "About that long," said Al, accepting a golf ball from his caddy. "Long enough to earn old timer privileges."
         "Such as?"
         "Special golf balls, for one. Like this here Sinner Special."
         "This what?"
         "This," said Al, with a big grin.
         A curious thing. A sphere, golf-ball dimpled but clear. Inside, a naked man and a naked woman. And a porcupine.
         "They look in pretty good shape," said Perry, for want of anything intelligent to say.
         "Sure. Regeneration. Smack! Whack! Trauma ward special. Then they get fixed up."
         Inside the golf ball, the man and the woman sat slumped, listless. The porcupine was not moving. Experimentally, Perry shook the golf ball. Throwing the scene into screaming spasm.
         "Jesus!" said Perry, shocked at his callous error.
         "That's nothing," said Al with a chuckle. "Why, once I hit this sucker so hard both their heads came off."
         "That's possible?" said Perry.
         "Here? Sure. Anything's possible here."
         "Doesn't this ... worry you? At all?"
         "You some kinda atheist communist or something?" said Al, turning surly. "These are sinners."
         Atheist communist. A tad old-fashioned.
         "How long have you been here?" said Perry.
         "Oh, since ... 1958, I guess. Yeah. That was it. 1958."
         "This is sick," said Perry, peering into the bloodstained interior of the Sinner Special golf ball, where the man, the woman and the porcupine lay in a groaning heap.
         "You were right," said Al, to Midrog. "He doesn't fit in." Then, to Perry: "You know your problem? You expect things to make sense."
         "Of course."
         "But they don't," said Al. "So get used to it."
         "I don't think I can," said Perry.
         "Well, then," said Al, and clubbed him, knocking him down.
         "What did you do that for?" said Perry, looking up from the ground, too shocked to really feel pain.
         "It's my little hobby," said Al. "Nice knowing you, Perry."
         Then Al Treeve whacked Perry Voight in the head, killing him outright.
         When Perry came to, he was lying in a concrete car park. A big one. It went on for miles. But there were no cars in sight. Off to his right was a golf course. Not a very nice one - it was a hot and shadeless glaring place with withered grass and stunted trees. Even so, some golfers were playing on it.
         "So where's this?" said Perry, to himself.
         "Thermostat," said one of the parking meters, answering him.
         "You speak English?" said Perry.
         "Sure I do," said the parking meter.
         "Then - where is this?"
         "I just told you."
         "No you didn't."
         "Yes I did. It's Thermostat."
         "That's a place?"
         "Yeah, sure. Basic theology. There's Cold Spaghetti, Alarm Clocks, Twisted Rodents and Thermostat. Oh, and Frozen Chocolate, too, let's not forget about Frozen Chocolate."
         "And Golf Course?" said Perry.
         "Yeah, you're right, there's Golf Course. I was forgetting Golf Course. But this is Thermostat."
         "And they have golf here ....?"
         "Oh, they have golf everywhere. Even in Japan."
         Even in Japan. Same pattern. Grown men, little white balls. The men chase the balls. They hit them. The balls run away. The balls don't run far enough. The men see where the balls have fallen. They follow their quarry, meaning to hit again.
         Off in the distance, Perry saw a woman talking to a couple of golfers. Maybe it was Daphne. Doing a survey? Maybe. Well. Maybe if you finally listened to her for once ....
         "The American spirit of optimism will not be quenched even by death," said the parking meter, as if reading his mind.
         "Hell, no," said Perry. "It won't. And why should it?"
         And, without waiting for an answer, he set off, his mind set for once on winning the woman rather than on teeing off.


The End                    

[Chaos]

Life on Planet Earth


        Harlan Joe was driving a truck from Chicago through to Denver the day the aliens arrived. Listening to the Big Event on radio, he was puzzled.
        "Papua New Guinea? Where the hell is Papua New Guinea?"
        Then he saw, up ahead, the woman in the red dress who was standing by the bright red sports car. She was trying to flag him down. For the sake of the red dress, Harlan Joe obliged. When he pulled up alongside of the red sports car, he saw one of the tires had blown out. He also saw that the woman had red, red lipstick. And that she was smiling at him.
        That was how Harlan Joe came to meet Avaltreen Blue.


*


        Why Papua New Guinea? That was never explained. Landing at Fort Moresby, the capital of PNG, was the first totally inexplicable and utterly alien thing which the aliens did.
        Everyone on the planet had been conditioned to expect the arrival of aliens. But the conventions of Hollywood had always called for aliens to show up in Washington DC or New York - or maybe Los Angeles. Not in some place in the tropical nowhere north of Australia.
         The aliens arrived in ships which were the color of aubergines, a shining purple fat with the potency of knowledge. They chose, for reasons which they did not choose to reveal, to call themselves the Polysynthacella. They had decided (rightly or wrongly) that they had made themselves into experts on the languages of planet Earth, and that they could legitimately name themselves.
        "We will unite you in knowledge," they said.
        What did this mean?
        Nobody knew. Hypothesis was protean, but all conclusions tentative. And, when asked to explain themselves, the Polysynthacella merely repeated their original statement, as if it was self-evident.
        "I don't think they're so bright," said Avaltreen Blue.
        It was the first original thought of her life. She might (conceivably) have had a second, except that, at that point, the police kicked in the door of the motel where Avaltreen Blue was shacked up with Harlan Joe, and arrested her for grand auto theft, possession of marijuana and the counterfeiting of United States currency.
        "I thought the Secret Service took care of the counterfeiting thing," said Harlan Joe, visiting her in jail.
        "Yeah," said Avaltreen Blue, looking tired, "but maybe they were busy or something."


*


        After six months in Papua New Guinea, the Polysynthacella moved to Chile, where they established a big base in the desert.
        "Yeah, Chile," said Harlan Joe, meeting Avaltreen Blue outside of the jail.
        "Where's that?" said Avaltreen.
        "Down south," said Harlan Joe, who had seen it on TV - the maps, the explanations and all. "You know. Way down south. Where they speak Spanish and all."
        "So maybe the big guys want to learn Spanish," said Avaltreen.
        Then she gave way to emotion, suddenly, unexpectedly, and wept. Harlan Joe took her in his arms and she wept all the more. She had not really believed that he would wait for her. She had not really believed that he cared.


*


        Down in Chile, the Polysynthacella covered a good half of one of the driest deserts in the world with a gritty substance which they claimed was powdered chimpanzee fur. Nobody knew why they did this, or where they got the fur from.
        The Polysynthacella were big, lumbering amphibians which looked like queen-size mattresses covered on both sides with short but powerful tentacles. The tentacles were a rubbery green and yellow tentacles and looked unconvincing, as if the Polysynthacella were not authentic creatures, but, rather, the flawed products of a second-rate plastic toy factory.
        "What are you here for?" asked Ispat Bean, winner of the "Meet the Aliens" contest.
        "We are here to unite you in knowledge," said one of the Polysynthacella, the one which called itself Medellin Spalding.
        "So how come that Papua place?" said Ispat Bean. "You like the coffee, or what?"
        "It is part of your planet," said Medellin Spalding. "You should know about it."
        "Oh yeah?" said Ispat, who, being from Ohio, didn't see the necessity. "And how about that dumb name of yours?"
        "The mind needs chewing gum," said Medellin Spalding, cryptically.
        And waved all his (its?) green and yellow tentacles simultaneously for a solid ten seconds.
        The scientists of the world were ecstatic. Ispat Bean, who was just a guy who made hamburgers at McDonald's in Cincinnati, a guy who was a part-time computer geek, a guy whose one claim to fame was that he kept piranhas as pets - this Ispat Bean had actually extracted information from the aliens.
        The aliens were, it seemed, of the opinion that Papua was important, or should be, not to the aliens themselves but to Earthlings such as Ispat Bean.
        That was as far as anyone got with interviewing the aliens, however, because, the very next day, they abruptly departed from the planet, without warning.


*


        A year later, the itching disease broke out, simultaneously, all over planet Earth. It was monstrous. It was like your whole body was one big itch. And x-ray analysis showed strange branching structures - a kind of supplementary nervous system, by the looks of it - spreading through the bodies of the afflicted.
        "The afflicted" being the entire population of the planet.
        "It's those aliens," said Harlan Joe, speaking to other truckers by CB radio as he headed into Akron.
        His truck rolled past a car which was stopped by the highway. In the car, a man. Maybe sleeping, maybe dead. Harlan Joe didn't stop. He was intent on his conversation. He was through the itching phase by now - otherwise he wouldn't have been able to drive the truck - but he was still as mad as hell.
        Harlan Joe didn't know - and wouldn't have cared if he had known - that the man in the car was Ispat Bean. Harlan Joe had seen Ispat Bean on TV, a while back, but had already forgotten all about him. Everyone else on planet Earth, pretty much, had done the same thing.
        Ispat Bean had gone from global supercelebrity to nonentity. His attempt to make it big ("My vision: a piranha in every home! The ecological solution to the food scraps problem!!") had failed absolutely. He was totally broke and was on the run, trying to stay ahead of a consortium of lawyers which wanted to extract one of his kidneys and half of his liver. (Some of the testimony in the class action suit was heartbreaking. "My little girl ... this is a photo of her beautiful little hand, before that ugly ... before that monstrous ... oh! And she did so want to play the violin ....")
        "Aliens," repeated Harlan Joe. "They did it. This plague, it's them."
        Harlan Joe was no scientist, but, as it happened, the world's best brains agreed with him.
        But why?
        Nobody knew.
        After Harlan Joe had driven past, Ispat Bean got out of the car, where he had been pretending to sleep. He looked around. Nobody was in sight. He hauled the body out of the trunk and dumped it by the roadside. He had already strapped ten pounds of plastic explosive to the body and rigged up a timing mechanism, which he now initiated. Five minutes after Ispat Bean drove away, the body exploded, sending little pieces of flesh and bone flying in all directions.
        That night, in his motel room, Ispat Bean watched the TV, eager for the first news of the Exploding Dog Killer. Having been famous once, Ispat was sure he could be famous again.
        Kill humans? Anyone can do that. And there is something in our nature which cheers on the Hannibal Lecters of the world. Humans are, after all, our competitors, and our enemies. It's people - strangers - who park in our chosen place, who grab the last carton of milk off of the supermarket shelf, who keep us awake by talking on the plane.
        But killing dogs ... now there's a whole new dimension of evil. Unimaginable evil. Evil worthy of prime time interviews, a movie, a video, a TV series, a book.
        "Next up," said the announcer, "the exploding elephant."
        Elephant? No, idiot! Dog! Not elephant - dog.
        But it was an elephant, after all. There was a parade in Sri Lanka, wherever the hell that was, and this elephant exploded.
        "Tamil Tiger terrorists have claimed responsibility," said the announcer.
        Say what? A bunch of tigers made an elephant explode?
        Ispat Bean couldn't quite figure it out. But he was starting to appreciate the truth of Ted Bundy's famous dictum (often erroneously attributed to Andy Warhol): "Achieving celebrity is not only more difficult than you imagine, it is more difficult than you can imagine."
        "But Bundy did it," said Ispat, "and I will too."


*


        After watching the exploding elephant, Harlan Joe went to take a shower, leaving the TV on, sound turned up loud, so he could listen to the horse racing.
        He was in the shower when he was -
        - in the truck.
        Trapped in a kind of full-sensorium movie of his own life, talking into the CB radio, saying, "It's those aliens," and seeing, out of the corner of his eye, a car by the road, some man slumped inside, maybe sleeping, maybe dead.
        Then he was back in the shower.
        The impact of the water on his naked flesh was galvanic. His head jerked back and slammed up against the nozzle of the shower, gashing the back of his head.
        "What the?!" said the racetrack commentator.
        Harlan Joe stumbled out of the shower, heedless of the blood and water he was spreading around the motel room, and went to the TV. The race was still on, but the commentator had lost it - was trying to recover, but had gotten such a shock that he could not remember the names of the horses, the names of the riders. His own name, perhaps.
        "You too," said Harlan Joe.


*


        "Next up," said the announcer, brightly, "the exploding elephant."
        And Ispat Bean was forced to watch the whole thing all over again. The big story which had wiped his little story out of the news (if, indeed, his little story, his exploding dog, had even been noticed by the world.)
        Rubbing salt in his wounds.


*


        Inside of seventy-two hours, there were three distinct "playback episodes", in which every person on the planet experienced a playback of part of his or her life. The playback episodes were different for each person, but seemed to range in length from three seconds through to about ninety minutes. Regardless of length, however, subjectively each playback episode seemed to take close to zero time.
        The scientists came up with a hypothesis pretty quickly.
        The new structure which the Polysynthacella had inflicted upon the human race was an organic recording-playback device. It recorded part of your own experience then played that experience back, so you lived through it all over again.
        During playback, your perception of time was messed around with, so a couple of seconds were enough to permit the replaying of well over an hour of experience. And, at the same time, you were disconnected from your living body.
        The results?
        Well, a fair few auto accidents, and a couple of really spectacular mid-air collisions. Plus a big spike in the number of household accidents, particularly in the kitchen - nasty incidents involving boiling water, for example, or boiling oil. And some brutal stories came out of saw mills and factories, as well. The accident and emergency wards were full.
        "But we will survive," said the President grimly.
        President Bundy - Howie Bundy, the brother of Ted - was everything a president should be in that hour of need. Grim, spiritual, Christian, confident, resolved. No cheap jokes. No canned laughter. But no tears, either. No flinching.
        Watching the president on TV, Harlan Joe felt reassured. Okay, so they were living through a disaster, but it was a familiar American disaster, unfolding in the continental United States, as disasters should. You could understand it without a bunch of maps of weird places with strange names nobody could even pronounce. It was a disaster that America owned.
        (Okay, okay, so the people in Africa or wherever were living through the same thing. But it wasn't compulsory to think about them.)


*


        Harlan Joe fell asleep in front of the TV and woke to find his mouth full of glue. He was breathing it, hauling it in, gulping it down as if his life depended on it. He tried to stop, but found the body which owned him was not responsive to his commands.
        The body begged, scavenged, slept on the streets of a busy city. A full sixteen hours.
        Then - whammo! Harlan Joe was back in front of the TV again, wide awake. Back where he had started from. He looked at his wristwatch. He'd been asleep when it all started, so he wasn't sure how much time had gone by. The TV announcer was stammering, seemed to have lost his bookmark in the universe.


*


        By the next day, the city had a name - Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras. And so did the boy. Leon, little Leon, now destined to be dried out at the Betty Ford clinic at the expense of the CIA, which had muscled in as his protector.
        Leon was the first of the global playback stars. Presumably, there would be a second. If so, should there be a special category in the Oscars for playback stars?
        "I don't have an opinion," said Octave Bundy - brother of Howie and Ted - on the set of the movie provisionally entitled "Leon's Playback" (coming to a movie theater near you inside of the week, if technically possible.) "I deal with actors, not the real world."
        Meantime, the news was dominated by emergency precautions which people were taking - or could, or should - to cope with the "subjectivity lapses", which were now lasting up to half an hour. Globally, little Leon's playback had killed over 50,000 people and put several million in hospital. "Playback," as it was coming to be simply called, was shaping up to be a major problem for the survival of the human race.
        "We will unite you in knowledge," the aliens had said.
        And they sure had.
        But, hey - who wants to be united with some glue-sniffing kid in some gutter some place where they don't even speak English?
        "True charity cannot be coerced," said President Howie Bundy, denouncing the perceived agenda of the Polysynthacella. "The name for forced charity is gunpoint robbery, pure and simple."
        The gun manufacturers launched a big advertising campaign advising people to go out and buy themselves guns to protect themselves against "anyone who wants to rob you, whatever the hell their holy excuse."


*


        "You know what I want?" said Avaltreen.
        "What?" said Harlan Joe.
        "I'd like a, you know, playback. With some Hollywood stud, you know, like, someone on TV."
        "Someone famous?" said Harlan Joe.
        "Yeah ... you know ... doing ... Hollywood things."
        What things? Harlan Joe couldn't imagine. Neither could Avaltreen Blue. But they did their best to improvise their own Hollywood-style debauchery.
        "So hot," said Avaltreen, afterwards.
        "I know I was," said Harlan Joe, breathing her murmering perfume.
        What Avaltreen really meant was that she had gotten uncomfortably hot and wanted to cool down in a cold shower. But she let Harlan enjoy his delusions, and let him slip off to sleep before she extracted herself from his embrace and took herself off to the shower.


*


        Harlan slept solidly that night, only to wake to find himself standing by the white plastic door, looking through the little porthole at the wilderness below. Bleak whiteness, snow covered hills with a prickling of black pines. A slow wide river running through the wilderness.
        Then he was back in his own flesh, and awake, wide awake.
        The CIA never found out who that was, though a dozen claimants came forward - me, me, let it be me, me who housed the human race, if only a single minute.


*


        A month, and nothing. Then Harlan Joe was sitting in a roadside cafe, putting ketchup on his hotdog, when the cafe was suddenly gone, and Avaltreen Blue was saying "Yeah ... you know ... doing ... Hollywood things."
        Then they were doing those things, Avaltreen Blue was whispering beneath him, her fingers sliding across his sweating flesh.
        "So hot," said Avaltreen.
        Then she was gone, and Harlan Joe found himself back in the cafe, slumped over the table, his face one huge big mess of ketchup, the ketchup bottle on the floor, the cafe full of choke on account of the stuff which had caught fire in the kitchen.


*


        Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue were famous for all of a week, until the Bundy thing.
        "Hello," said Ted Bundy, speaking for the benefit of the camera which was filming him. "I'm in China. And this package here - let's call it Ching Chaw, though that's not its real name - is scheduled for execution in accordance with the law. Don't feel sorry for the package. It broke a whole bunch of laws. It has it coming."
        Then Ted did one of his famous performance art executions, this one using a plastic bag, a scalpel, six pounds of mud and a teaspoon. He had paid ten million dollars for the privilege. He got his money's worth.
        In the playback, subjectively, the whole world was Ted. The next day, copycats repeated the whole thing in schools and kindergartens scattered across the world.
        "Hey," said Ted, bewildered at the public's outraged response. "I'm an artist."
        But the assassin at his door pulled the trigger all the same, scattering his brains across the freshly-painted yellow wall behind.


*


        Ted Bundy was famous for all of a week, his fame largely extinguishing that of Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue. Then the pack rape in Papua New Guinea left thirty per cent of the world's population with post-traumatic stress disorder. And then came the free fall parachutist, then the twelve-hour production line shift in the Chinese plastic sandal factory, then the ten days in the life of a homeless person, then the electric chair incident which, overnight, jumped the global suicide rate by sixty per cent.
        By that time, Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue were forgotten.
        Almost.
        But I remember them.
        These days, Harlan Joe does beer advertisements, and Avaltreen Blue has this low-level soft porn career. That's not bad going considering how quickly we've taken to forgetting our playback heroes.


*


        Anyway. That brings me to the present moment. To me. You're in me, now. Enjoying playback. Enjoying? Enduring. Whatever. I trust you are. Or will be.
        I have this vision, see.
        I'm going to be a playback hero.
        It hasn't happened yet - granted. But it will. The whole world will be in me, living my life. That's my vision. So let me introduce myself.
        See this face in the mirror? This is me. Ispat Bean. Now, I'm going to punch that face right in the jaw. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt like hell. But there's no escape.
        Wham!
        Boy ... that hurt. Right?
        Oh yeah.
        When my time comes, you're not going to forget me. Ispat Bean. Remember the name - okay?
        Now, this looks like an electric chair. And it is. Kind of. Only it's not fatal. Let me strap us in. The rest of the process is automatic. See that computer over there? It's programmed to give us a pretty wild ride over the next ... well, I won't tell you how long. That's for me to know and you to guess at.
        Ay-ah!
        That hurt!
        Pain. Lowest common denominator. Binding us - making the many one. E pluribus unum and all that. I believe it is my destiny to fulfill the agenda of the Polysynthacella, to unite us in knowledge, the knowledge being that pain is the ruling One. Now say my name. Ispat Bean! Ay-ah! That hurt, it hurts! Ispat Bean! Ispat Bean! Big one coming - hold tight and scream it! Ispat Bean!


The End                    

[Chaos]

Life on Planet Earth


        Harlan Joe was driving a truck from Chicago through to Denver the day the aliens arrived. Listening to the Big Event on radio, he was puzzled.
        "Papua New Guinea? Where the hell is Papua New Guinea?"
        Then he saw, up ahead, the woman in the red dress who was standing by the bright red sports car. She was trying to flag him down. For the sake of the red dress, Harlan Joe obliged. When he pulled up alongside of the red sports car, he saw one of the tires had blown out. He also saw that the woman had red, red lipstick. And that she was smiling at him.
        That was how Harlan Joe came to meet Avaltreen Blue.


*


        Why Papua New Guinea? That was never explained. Landing at Fort Moresby, the capital of PNG, was the first totally inexplicable and utterly alien thing which the aliens did.
        Everyone on the planet had been conditioned to expect the arrival of aliens. But the conventions of Hollywood had always called for aliens to show up in Washington DC or New York - or maybe Los Angeles. Not in some place in the tropical nowhere north of Australia.
         The aliens arrived in ships which were the color of aubergines, a shining purple fat with the potency of knowledge. They chose, for reasons which they did not choose to reveal, to call themselves the Polysynthacella. They had decided (rightly or wrongly) that they had made themselves into experts on the languages of planet Earth, and that they could legitimately name themselves.
        "We will unite you in knowledge," they said.
        What did this mean?
        Nobody knew. Hypothesis was protean, but all conclusions tentative. And, when asked to explain themselves, the Polysynthacella merely repeated their original statement, as if it was self-evident.
        "I don't think they're so bright," said Avaltreen Blue.
        It was the first original thought of her life. She might (conceivably) have had a second, except that, at that point, the police kicked in the door of the motel where Avaltreen Blue was shacked up with Harlan Joe, and arrested her for grand auto theft, possession of marijuana and the counterfeiting of United States currency.
        "I thought the Secret Service took care of the counterfeiting thing," said Harlan Joe, visiting her in jail.
        "Yeah," said Avaltreen Blue, looking tired, "but maybe they were busy or something."


*


        After six months in Papua New Guinea, the Polysynthacella moved to Chile, where they established a big base in the desert.
        "Yeah, Chile," said Harlan Joe, meeting Avaltreen Blue outside of the jail.
        "Where's that?" said Avaltreen.
        "Down south," said Harlan Joe, who had seen it on TV - the maps, the explanations and all. "You know. Way down south. Where they speak Spanish and all."
        "So maybe the big guys want to learn Spanish," said Avaltreen.
        Then she gave way to emotion, suddenly, unexpectedly, and wept. Harlan Joe took her in his arms and she wept all the more. She had not really believed that he would wait for her. She had not really believed that he cared.


*


        Down in Chile, the Polysynthacella covered a good half of one of the driest deserts in the world with a gritty substance which they claimed was powdered chimpanzee fur. Nobody knew why they did this, or where they got the fur from.
        The Polysynthacella were big, lumbering amphibians which looked like queen-size mattresses covered on both sides with short but powerful tentacles. The tentacles were a rubbery green and yellow tentacles and looked unconvincing, as if the Polysynthacella were not authentic creatures, but, rather, the flawed products of a second-rate plastic toy factory.
        "What are you here for?" asked Ispat Bean, winner of the "Meet the Aliens" contest.
        "We are here to unite you in knowledge," said one of the Polysynthacella, the one which called itself Medellin Spalding.
        "So how come that Papua place?" said Ispat Bean. "You like the coffee, or what?"
        "It is part of your planet," said Medellin Spalding. "You should know about it."
        "Oh yeah?" said Ispat, who, being from Ohio, didn't see the necessity. "And how about that dumb name of yours?"
        "The mind needs chewing gum," said Medellin Spalding, cryptically.
        And waved all his (its?) green and yellow tentacles simultaneously for a solid ten seconds.
        The scientists of the world were ecstatic. Ispat Bean, who was just a guy who made hamburgers at McDonald's in Cincinnati, a guy who was a part-time computer geek, a guy whose one claim to fame was that he kept piranhas as pets - this Ispat Bean had actually extracted information from the aliens.
        The aliens were, it seemed, of the opinion that Papua was important, or should be, not to the aliens themselves but to Earthlings such as Ispat Bean.
        That was as far as anyone got with interviewing the aliens, however, because, the very next day, they abruptly departed from the planet, without warning.


*


        A year later, the itching disease broke out, simultaneously, all over planet Earth. It was monstrous. It was like your whole body was one big itch. And x-ray analysis showed strange branching structures - a kind of supplementary nervous system, by the looks of it - spreading through the bodies of the afflicted.
        "The afflicted" being the entire population of the planet.
        "It's those aliens," said Harlan Joe, speaking to other truckers by CB radio as he headed into Akron.
        His truck rolled past a car which was stopped by the highway. In the car, a man. Maybe sleeping, maybe dead. Harlan Joe didn't stop. He was intent on his conversation. He was through the itching phase by now - otherwise he wouldn't have been able to drive the truck - but he was still as mad as hell.
        Harlan Joe didn't know - and wouldn't have cared if he had known - that the man in the car was Ispat Bean. Harlan Joe had seen Ispat Bean on TV, a while back, but had already forgotten all about him. Everyone else on planet Earth, pretty much, had done the same thing.
        Ispat Bean had gone from global supercelebrity to nonentity. His attempt to make it big ("My vision: a piranha in every home! The ecological solution to the food scraps problem!!") had failed absolutely. He was totally broke and was on the run, trying to stay ahead of a consortium of lawyers which wanted to extract one of his kidneys and half of his liver. (Some of the testimony in the class action suit was heartbreaking. "My little girl ... this is a photo of her beautiful little hand, before that ugly ... before that monstrous ... oh! And she did so want to play the violin ....")
        "Aliens," repeated Harlan Joe. "They did it. This plague, it's them."
        Harlan Joe was no scientist, but, as it happened, the world's best brains agreed with him.
        But why?
        Nobody knew.
        After Harlan Joe had driven past, Ispat Bean got out of the car, where he had been pretending to sleep. He looked around. Nobody was in sight. He hauled the body out of the trunk and dumped it by the roadside. He had already strapped ten pounds of plastic explosive to the body and rigged up a timing mechanism, which he now initiated. Five minutes after Ispat Bean drove away, the body exploded, sending little pieces of flesh and bone flying in all directions.
        That night, in his motel room, Ispat Bean watched the TV, eager for the first news of the Exploding Dog Killer. Having been famous once, Ispat was sure he could be famous again.
        Kill humans? Anyone can do that. And there is something in our nature which cheers on the Hannibal Lecters of the world. Humans are, after all, our competitors, and our enemies. It's people - strangers - who park in our chosen place, who grab the last carton of milk off of the supermarket shelf, who keep us awake by talking on the plane.
        But killing dogs ... now there's a whole new dimension of evil. Unimaginable evil. Evil worthy of prime time interviews, a movie, a video, a TV series, a book.
        "Next up," said the announcer, "the exploding elephant."
        Elephant? No, idiot! Dog! Not elephant - dog.
        But it was an elephant, after all. There was a parade in Sri Lanka, wherever the hell that was, and this elephant exploded.
        "Tamil Tiger terrorists have claimed responsibility," said the announcer.
        Say what? A bunch of tigers made an elephant explode?
        Ispat Bean couldn't quite figure it out. But he was starting to appreciate the truth of Ted Bundy's famous dictum (often erroneously attributed to Andy Warhol): "Achieving celebrity is not only more difficult than you imagine, it is more difficult than you can imagine."
        "But Bundy did it," said Ispat, "and I will too."


*


        After watching the exploding elephant, Harlan Joe went to take a shower, leaving the TV on, sound turned up loud, so he could listen to the horse racing.
        He was in the shower when he was -
        - in the truck.
        Trapped in a kind of full-sensorium movie of his own life, talking into the CB radio, saying, "It's those aliens," and seeing, out of the corner of his eye, a car by the road, some man slumped inside, maybe sleeping, maybe dead.
        Then he was back in the shower.
        The impact of the water on his naked flesh was galvanic. His head jerked back and slammed up against the nozzle of the shower, gashing the back of his head.
        "What the?!" said the racetrack commentator.
        Harlan Joe stumbled out of the shower, heedless of the blood and water he was spreading around the motel room, and went to the TV. The race was still on, but the commentator had lost it - was trying to recover, but had gotten such a shock that he could not remember the names of the horses, the names of the riders. His own name, perhaps.
        "You too," said Harlan Joe.


*


        "Next up," said the announcer, brightly, "the exploding elephant."
        And Ispat Bean was forced to watch the whole thing all over again. The big story which had wiped his little story out of the news (if, indeed, his little story, his exploding dog, had even been noticed by the world.)
        Rubbing salt in his wounds.


*


        Inside of seventy-two hours, there were three distinct "playback episodes", in which every person on the planet experienced a playback of part of his or her life. The playback episodes were different for each person, but seemed to range in length from three seconds through to about ninety minutes. Regardless of length, however, subjectively each playback episode seemed to take close to zero time.
        The scientists came up with a hypothesis pretty quickly.
        The new structure which the Polysynthacella had inflicted upon the human race was an organic recording-playback device. It recorded part of your own experience then played that experience back, so you lived through it all over again.
        During playback, your perception of time was messed around with, so a couple of seconds were enough to permit the replaying of well over an hour of experience. And, at the same time, you were disconnected from your living body.
        The results?
        Well, a fair few auto accidents, and a couple of really spectacular mid-air collisions. Plus a big spike in the number of household accidents, particularly in the kitchen - nasty incidents involving boiling water, for example, or boiling oil. And some brutal stories came out of saw mills and factories, as well. The accident and emergency wards were full.
        "But we will survive," said the President grimly.
        President Bundy - Howie Bundy, the brother of Ted - was everything a president should be in that hour of need. Grim, spiritual, Christian, confident, resolved. No cheap jokes. No canned laughter. But no tears, either. No flinching.
        Watching the president on TV, Harlan Joe felt reassured. Okay, so they were living through a disaster, but it was a familiar American disaster, unfolding in the continental United States, as disasters should. You could understand it without a bunch of maps of weird places with strange names nobody could even pronounce. It was a disaster that America owned.
        (Okay, okay, so the people in Africa or wherever were living through the same thing. But it wasn't compulsory to think about them.)


*


        Harlan Joe fell asleep in front of the TV and woke to find his mouth full of glue. He was breathing it, hauling it in, gulping it down as if his life depended on it. He tried to stop, but found the body which owned him was not responsive to his commands.
        The body begged, scavenged, slept on the streets of a busy city. A full sixteen hours.
        Then - whammo! Harlan Joe was back in front of the TV again, wide awake. Back where he had started from. He looked at his wristwatch. He'd been asleep when it all started, so he wasn't sure how much time had gone by. The TV announcer was stammering, seemed to have lost his bookmark in the universe.


*


        By the next day, the city had a name - Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras. And so did the boy. Leon, little Leon, now destined to be dried out at the Betty Ford clinic at the expense of the CIA, which had muscled in as his protector.
        Leon was the first of the global playback stars. Presumably, there would be a second. If so, should there be a special category in the Oscars for playback stars?
        "I don't have an opinion," said Octave Bundy - brother of Howie and Ted - on the set of the movie provisionally entitled "Leon's Playback" (coming to a movie theater near you inside of the week, if technically possible.) "I deal with actors, not the real world."
        Meantime, the news was dominated by emergency precautions which people were taking - or could, or should - to cope with the "subjectivity lapses", which were now lasting up to half an hour. Globally, little Leon's playback had killed over 50,000 people and put several million in hospital. "Playback," as it was coming to be simply called, was shaping up to be a major problem for the survival of the human race.
        "We will unite you in knowledge," the aliens had said.
        And they sure had.
        But, hey - who wants to be united with some glue-sniffing kid in some gutter some place where they don't even speak English?
        "True charity cannot be coerced," said President Howie Bundy, denouncing the perceived agenda of the Polysynthacella. "The name for forced charity is gunpoint robbery, pure and simple."
        The gun manufacturers launched a big advertising campaign advising people to go out and buy themselves guns to protect themselves against "anyone who wants to rob you, whatever the hell their holy excuse."


*


        "You know what I want?" said Avaltreen.
        "What?" said Harlan Joe.
        "I'd like a, you know, playback. With some Hollywood stud, you know, like, someone on TV."
        "Someone famous?" said Harlan Joe.
        "Yeah ... you know ... doing ... Hollywood things."
        What things? Harlan Joe couldn't imagine. Neither could Avaltreen Blue. But they did their best to improvise their own Hollywood-style debauchery.
        "So hot," said Avaltreen, afterwards.
        "I know I was," said Harlan Joe, breathing her murmering perfume.
        What Avaltreen really meant was that she had gotten uncomfortably hot and wanted to cool down in a cold shower. But she let Harlan enjoy his delusions, and let him slip off to sleep before she extracted herself from his embrace and took herself off to the shower.


*


        Harlan slept solidly that night, only to wake to find himself standing by the white plastic door, looking through the little porthole at the wilderness below. Bleak whiteness, snow covered hills with a prickling of black pines. A slow wide river running through the wilderness.
        Then he was back in his own flesh, and awake, wide awake.
        The CIA never found out who that was, though a dozen claimants came forward - me, me, let it be me, me who housed the human race, if only a single minute.


*


        A month, and nothing. Then Harlan Joe was sitting in a roadside cafe, putting ketchup on his hotdog, when the cafe was suddenly gone, and Avaltreen Blue was saying "Yeah ... you know ... doing ... Hollywood things."
        Then they were doing those things, Avaltreen Blue was whispering beneath him, her fingers sliding across his sweating flesh.
        "So hot," said Avaltreen.
        Then she was gone, and Harlan Joe found himself back in the cafe, slumped over the table, his face one huge big mess of ketchup, the ketchup bottle on the floor, the cafe full of choke on account of the stuff which had caught fire in the kitchen.


*


        Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue were famous for all of a week, until the Bundy thing.
        "Hello," said Ted Bundy, speaking for the benefit of the camera which was filming him. "I'm in China. And this package here - let's call it Ching Chaw, though that's not its real name - is scheduled for execution in accordance with the law. Don't feel sorry for the package. It broke a whole bunch of laws. It has it coming."
        Then Ted did one of his famous performance art executions, this one using a plastic bag, a scalpel, six pounds of mud and a teaspoon. He had paid ten million dollars for the privilege. He got his money's worth.
        In the playback, subjectively, the whole world was Ted. The next day, copycats repeated the whole thing in schools and kindergartens scattered across the world.
        "Hey," said Ted, bewildered at the public's outraged response. "I'm an artist."
        But the assassin at his door pulled the trigger all the same, scattering his brains across the freshly-painted yellow wall behind.


*


        Ted Bundy was famous for all of a week, his fame largely extinguishing that of Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue. Then the pack rape in Papua New Guinea left thirty per cent of the world's population with post-traumatic stress disorder. And then came the free fall parachutist, then the twelve-hour production line shift in the Chinese plastic sandal factory, then the ten days in the life of a homeless person, then the electric chair incident which, overnight, jumped the global suicide rate by sixty per cent.
        By that time, Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue were forgotten.
        Almost.
        But I remember them.
        These days, Harlan Joe does beer advertisements, and Avaltreen Blue has this low-level soft porn career. That's not bad going considering how quickly we've taken to forgetting our playback heroes.


*


        Anyway. That brings me to the present moment. To me. You're in me, now. Enjoying playback. Enjoying? Enduring. Whatever. I trust you are. Or will be.
        I have this vision, see.
        I'm going to be a playback hero.
        It hasn't happened yet - granted. But it will. The whole world will be in me, living my life. That's my vision. So let me introduce myself.
        See this face in the mirror? This is me. Ispat Bean. Now, I'm going to punch that face right in the jaw. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt like hell. But there's no escape.
        Wham!
        Boy ... that hurt. Right?
        Oh yeah.
        When my time comes, you're not going to forget me. Ispat Bean. Remember the name - okay?
        Now, this looks like an electric chair. And it is. Kind of. Only it's not fatal. Let me strap us in. The rest of the process is automatic. See that computer over there? It's programmed to give us a pretty wild ride over the next ... well, I won't tell you how long. That's for me to know and you to guess at.
        Ay-ah!
        That hurt!
        Pain. Lowest common denominator. Binding us - making the many one. E pluribus unum and all that. I believe it is my destiny to fulfill the agenda of the Polysynthacella, to unite us in knowledge, the knowledge being that pain is the ruling One. Now say my name. Ispat Bean! Ay-ah! That hurt, it hurts! Ispat Bean! Ispat Bean! Big one coming - hold tight and scream it! Ispat Bean!


The End