Fast-Forward Flapjacks
Whirled
War III was strictly chemical until the mid-1980s, when it went biological. Up
to that point, the Untied States and the Sobeit Onion worked frantically to
save their people from chemical ruin, but this proved largely futile. The bulk
of the lower and working classes had been hopelessly infiltrated and reduced to
gibbering idiots; pathetic victims of crack, meth, dust, weed, junk, and mass
brainwave entrainment, virtually useless for all but the simplest repetitive
tasks. The coincident global emergence of mass automation then rendered them
totally obsolete, saddling the superpowers with half a billion or so lumps of
useless flesh.
What
to do, what to do? After farming out of what menial tasks remained to the
so-called Turd Whirled, the two major powers basically imploded. Urban centers
rotted inside-out, families disintegrated, national IQs plummeted, intelligent
laborers were imported from Aphasia and Eastern Myopia; puddles of drool
accumulated in shopping malls, abandoned classrooms, strip clubs, fast food
joints, seedy bars, graffiti-covered subways, musty old libraries filled with
yellowing obsolete books, gum-slicked sidewalks outside infested flop houses…
Faced
with the total collapse of all that is good and righteous in totalitarian life,
the stupor-powers collaborated and appeared to find temporary salvation in a
biological war, turning virulent strains of pathogens loose on their own people,
targeting the brown, black, junkies, poor, disenfranchised, unentitled,
sodomists, crack heads, toothless meth scratchers everywhere… But this too
turned out to be more problem than solution, soon threatening to spread to the
global blood supply and wipe out the good, the clean, the rich, the upstanding white
elite.
The
idea of running a good old-fashioned conventional war was then entertained but quickly
abandoned due to lack of interest on the part of the hollowed-out masses, whose
brains simply couldn’t be entrained sufficiently after decades of addiction. Gone were the days when millions
could focus their hate long enough to jumpstart a large-scale campaign.
Feasibility studies had long-since ruled out the viability of solving the
so-called “population deadwood problem” with nuclear weapons, due to global
fallout, so things were pretty much left to drift into the new millennium.
The
various alien powers-that-be were appealed to, but they’d already abducted far
more humans than they needed to establish their hybrid lines. Nor were they
interested in vaporizing a billion or so on a contract basis, due to the
projected impact on what they call the “off-life”; we refer to this variously
as heaven, purgatory, limbo, the bardo, nothingness, depending on your belief
system. They claimed that purging the deadwood would flood the off-life,
generating an unpredictably devastating tsunami rebound effect on the living.
The Grayliens seem to have a much clearer, more evolved grasp of the cycle of
life and death, to the extent that they manage their involvement with it as a
tractable systems engineering problem might be dealt with by humans. However,
in the late 20th Century, they were either unwilling or unable to
enlighten us further in this area.
With
the discovery of the Mayan time springs deep in the Youcantan jungle, mankind
finally caught a break. Due to the subsequent proliferation of time drugs, it
is now difficult to pinpoint the date on which the springs were discovered, but
it appears to have been shortly after the turn of the new millennium, give or
take a year. Within a decade, despite the best efforts of governments
everywhere, time drugs had spread across the globe into every walk of life. Virtually
everyone became addicted to slo-mo sprays, time-reversal rubs, stop-action
powders, injectable interludes, fast-forward flapjacks, rewind roll-ons,
time-slip Slurpees, time-stop stogies, time-travel tabs…
Anything
that flies was soon converted to distribute time drugs, flooding the
atmosphere, seeding every cloudtop. By 2010 (or what passed for it, given the
increasingly subjective nature of time), Dearth’s water cycle was totally saturated
with time drugs. Surprisingly, the net effect was a certain averaged temporal
quality not totally unlike the original pristine environment, though relatively
discontinuous and unpredictable. As a result, the newly washed world clock
tends to jitter a bit, giving life a certain unmanageable quality. The tenor of
this departure from continuous time varies with locale, depending on the cloud
seeding activities of the local government and her enemies. In addition, the
global presence of a vast melange of time drugs tends to enhance the effects of
individually administered agents, increasing their potency several fold.
Today
it is almost unthinkable to attempt to compete on any level in any field
without the aid of time drugs. Battlefields, studios, boardrooms, auditoriums,
theaters, barber shops, supermarkets, garbage trucks, churches, cemeteries,
tourist traps -- all are treated continually with the latest custom time drug
mix, designed for ultimate consumer satisfaction. The effect is quite disconcerting,
making it virtually impossible to know whether one is dreaming, reminiscing,
waxing nostalgic, or actually time traveling at any given moment. The whole
concept of the present has been essentially trashed.
John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been
nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in many literary journals. A
collection of his poetry, Intunesia,
is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/
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