Chasing Oranges Page 3
chapter
The wonderfully deep-pocketed people of Notobia had never heard of the element before its sudden and unexpected discovery. Many of them had little or no knowledge of anything which had little to do with their blessed remote piece of land. Perhaps a few lucky ones might have, on one of their few trips abroad, come across the stuff and perhaps even witnessed some of the mystical things the awesome substance was used for. The rest of them were, however, as ignorant of its awesome power as they were about nearly everything else in the Universe.
Outside the borders of the small nation, the potential of the newly discovered element was overwhelming as well as endless. It eventually was introduced into all facets of daily and private life. Anything, from the manufacturing of outrageously extra-resistant condoms to the production of ultra-ejaculating, plasma, hydrogen-detonated, intercontinental, annihilation bombs used to anticipate and control the explosions of supernovas. A unique element. Plain and jelly-like to the touch, that held within it unthinkable amounts of energy. The thing stars and heroes were made of. Heroes of the past of course, there aren’t any left anymore.
The element was well known across time and space for its quasi spiritual powers, given the incredible amount of clean energy which was contained in relatively minute amounts of it. Earth of course being, as chance would have it, inhabited by one of the most backward civilisations in the known universe, became the sole greatest importer of the energy rich jelly.
To put it into context, an Earthling manufactured H-bomb, was to a basketball amount of the element, what a hand grenade was to a H-bomb. And to put that into context, an Earthling British teaspoon of the element was to a cubic centimetre of Lumilagro, what a kick in the balls was to the effects of a H-bomb. Quite staggering differences if you can get your head round it all, let alone your arms. Lumilagro, as it was incidentally known on planet Earth, was the Universe’s most energy-rich element. For lack of a better understanding on earthling's behalf, it was referred to as something quite miraculous and heavenly. Hence its name, which means “Penniless man rises” in some tribal dialect which now escapes me. And that’s penniless, not penisless.
The dark recorded history of the cube, tells of when the United Corporations of Planet Earth did all they could to procure themselves as much of the precious element as possible. Having been on the brink of destruction and having scraped the barrel dry for all other forms of energy, they turned to the miraculous element for a lifeline, a last chance at getting it right. It was double or nothing time. And so it went for the best part of two and a half decades. Importing the stuff like there was no tomorrow. (Buying it cheap and selling it high.) Consequently financing the most dubious of inter stellar dictators, that would happily post them as much of the stuff as they could possibly afford. That was until something rather unexpected happened. In the midst of it all, a small, rather insignificant, until then, nation on planet Earth, known among its people as Notobia, discovered untapped amounts of the element under their buttocks. About 22 miles under their butts to be precise, in pockets buried deep, close to the core of the planet. The discovery of untouched reserves of the stuff was big news for Notobia, the cold little country, tucked conveniently away from all struggles of life, in the most remote of corners. Over night, the new fountain of youth would transform the small country into one of the galaxy’s richest lands creating wealth by the ton load for the wealthiest minority. Initially known to Earthlings as a very complicated Lactzeronaian-threpolatica, the universal energy-rich element was conveniently re-baptised by the careful propaganda machine of the Notobian regime to “Lact-obia”. (Borrowing the first two letters from its overly intricate scientific name, and its back end from the small, soon to be rich, nation.) The rest of planet Earth, however, could look forward to a future world of pain, as those most doomed, in due course, would fall prey to a precious yet devastating addictive substance. A sister synthetic version of the great element whose existence they owed to that one glass-testicle-hanging scientist called Dr. Vaporubsan.
The big deal occurred when the infamous pioneer, whose full name ran: Herr Proffessor Analmore Albert Vaporubsan, discovered that if he mixed half a pint of imported Austrian ostrich glandular milk, with 0.05 grams of Uranium Isotope 92, with an undisclosed amount of the precious gelatinous element, he could produce one hell of a pyscho-telepathic drug. A drug so powerful and addictive that it could blend the unconscious minds of all those who abused it. The perfect weapon of mass mind control. It would come to be known on the streets by an array of wacky and delicious names ranging from, Lac, Lactose, Lubaluba, Lo Milagro B, The Way, The Dragon’s tail, Orange Pepper, Orange Haze, Orange Bud, Orange Current and so on so forth straight into the mist, and if you were lucky enough, out the other end. Many were a spin-off of the word Orange. The common colour pigment which seemed to take over those who abused it most.
As is the case with any good drug, the side effects were neither to be overlooked nor underestimated. Apart from constant attacks of hyper-paranoia and mind altering hallucinations, which users and abusers alike were inevitably subjected to, male individuals (although it was reported to have occurred to the odd female too) would suffer from hours of painful, full-blown, bull-like erections. A quasi-mystical side effect which saw people going on all sorts of spiritual and raping ventures while under the effect. Explosions of lust so hard and long lasting that even the dullest and wrinkliest of penises was guaranteed its fifteen hours of fame.
In one of the most curious reported cases of OrAngE fever (the well documented side-effect of the famous drug), a young gun by the name of Hutchington Pleasure was incidentally committed at the tender age of 16 for claiming to have ripped the fabric of space and time with his penis while under the influence. When the secret services found out that the bright eyed youngster had in fact torn into the very essence of everything, not with his hardened member but with a thaw-cracking fart, they threw him into the back of a bus and posted him deep into the ground where scientists and priests alike questioned him vigorously regarding his paranormal escapade. The papers wrote about his sad demise for a short while, but there were soon other, more captivating stories to cover. He was never seen or heard from again.
As on countless times before the greatest minds on planet Earth had managed, against all odds, to turn one of the universe’s greatest elements into something quite despicable. A troubling prospect to say the least.
rchapte
Notobia is, or rather used to be a beautiful place. One hell of a cold blazing place, like most of the planet, but still a decent place after all. Still, it was a whole lot better before the big meltdown, or so they say.
On a sulphur-free day you could climb to the top of the hills surrounding the city and if the purple fog didn’t get in your way you might just about be able to catch a glimpse of the beautiful rainbows, which the mining of Lactobia caused when the precious element made contact with the acidic seawater as it was extracted from deep under the seabed.
The drilling of Lactobia had long made a distant memory of anything resembling life in the depths of the ocean. There wasn’t a whale, or a sea-snail for that matter, left for anyone to fish in the acidy, murky waters which once gave birth to life on the planet. It wasn’t uncommon for OrAngE fevered citizens to poke their toes into the lifeless waters. Only a few lucky ones were ever able to walk out of it on their own two feet. Contact with the stuff would leave a grown elephant digested to the bone within a few seconds. It had happened. Sad affair. Of course it wasn’t a real elephant. It was an android replica. Made up of wires and chips. It still went down like a pile of shit. Fire and sparks all over. It didn’t scream. It hadn’t been programmed that way. Unknown to its inner software, the hardware was meeting its end. Still, it was sad to see it go. What a waste.
The drilling of Lactobia took off like wild fire soon after its initial discovery. The rigging platforms spotting the sea mile after mile. Notobia’s land mass had officially increased by 22% during the t
wo decades preceding the meltdown because of the platforms alone. One could literally hop from one rig to the next without ever knowing one was actually at sea. Some tourist made it a priority of his to do just that and hop his way from one part of the country to the next. At the 36th rig he slipped, knocked his head on the next rig and dropped, to his sad end into the depth of the ocean. Needless to say they never did find him again. It hadn’t always been like that of course. Jack Landan could recall the reality of the world he was born into, before the great meltdown. Before it all went to the dogs, the ones with wires and chips in them.
Of course, when it first became apparent that small amounts of Lactobia could be synthesised into infinite supplies of mind altering drugs, politicians did what they do best. A good law was written with everyone’s best interest at heart. It prohibited all Notobians from ever touching, dealing, consuming or even mentioning the OrAngE stuff which the rest of the world, and galaxy, craved and so addictively abused. The new legislation did little to curb the spreading of the drug to the lower underprivileged levels of living but it insured, as intended, to shield the leading elite from the unnecessary dangers of a substance that might eventually cause them to open their eyes to reality. A reality which no good government ever really wants its peers and masses to flirt with too much. What followed was a general, mind infecting, blindness to the corruption the element caused, the wars it financed and the precious lives it ruined.
Once enough influential people had been coerced into that way of thinking, the almighty-wise governance of Notobia suddenly deemed its production and export to all round-corners of the galaxy legal. No questions asked, as long as the stuff was paid for in Federally accepted Kredits. Good old Notobians would then be free to plod on in life, worry free. Free to rake in the sterling profits, and to reap the benefits the sale of the element in all its forms produced. It mattered little to any of them that once touched up, synthesized, tested and rebranded, the cheap drug would make its way back onto the streets of the very same nation from whence it had originated.
That is how the scum of the scum of the cube, and soon the galaxy, began their crusade to pave their way to the highest strata of society. And in so doing consolidated themselves as an integral part of the small nation’s economy. All manner of space tyrants and rapists were reserved royal welcomes and red carpets upon their business visits to Notobia. “And there goes another drug lord,” someone would say, “and another so called freedom fighter. Twenty-thousand tons of Lactobia the better and friends as before”. The sad truth is, that whilst accumulating universalistic amounts of money, Notobia, and the wisest of its ignorant citizens directly contributed to all sorts of badness across the worlds, as well as a worryingly subtle human mutation among male human beings.
“Human nature is an odd thing. Inter-molecular travel has taught us that” Professor Rudcock Nutter once uttered to a disinterested audience of crime novelists, before realising he’d walked into the wrong conference room.
“Few of us ever master the skills, frowned upon by others as being un-human.” He had continued, figuring he may as well continue his speech until someone quietly ushered him off stage. “Skills necessary to be able to live a life of simple pleasure. The rest of us linger on, and dwell in our miserable puddle of breath and self righteousness. Slaves to our needs and victims to the cheap pleasure that buying, and the buying power of Kredits can bring us. All along oblivious to the waste, pain and destruction which we leave behind. Living in a constant depressing spiral of fear. Fear of ourselves and the greatness that lies within each one of us.”
Pirates being pirates, and drug dealers being drug dealers, few ever seemed to mention to their desperate clients that the OrAngE produced serious after-effects. These varied, from general hallucinatory episodes, to self cannibalistic tendencies. The worst of them all though, was unexpected and unexplained sudden explosions of the male genital regions in disturbing pulps of purple sludge. As with all drugs, the pleasure the OrAngE produced among its abusers was deemed to be worth the risk. For a few hours of heavenly bliss and mystical-like mood swings of madness, individuals were willing to pay richly and risk it all. The OrAngE was a high which many considered worth blowing up for.
24 to 36 hours of constant erection was, however, the most troublesome side effect the controversial drug could and would cause. The distressing ramifications of the spread of the drug included such ludicrous issues such as the need to invent a new way of allowing fully erect men to release their bladders in an acceptable manner. As funny as it may seem, it was no laughing matter. As were the disturbingly escalating amount of rapes that ensued in the worst years of the abuse. Quite unsettling was also the number of cases involving deranged adult men misleadingly self-mutilating their members in all manner of ways. They called it the OrAngE Fever. The well documented side effect that affected those who chose to abuse, or fell prey to, the jazzy stuff. The renown fever which induced OrAngE-faced, erection-bulging fevered men of all ages to viscously stick their pulsating cocks into anything that resembled a hole.
It took a long many years and billions of Kredits before the Julian Law was drawn up and later passed through the 13 houses of parliament. Named after a young man, who, under the influence of the famous OrAngE fever, had lunged his over-sized penis into the exhaust of his lithium-powered motorbike and blown himself and half his neighbourhood to kingdom cum during the process. The law called for all exhaust pipes to be redesigned and made to look less appealing.
Most Notobians were and to the author’s knowledge, still are to this day beautiful people. Unfortunately the huge influx of Kredits and wealth which the small nation experienced, was always bound to bring along that customary unstoppable and unavoidable change that the richest of conservatives despise.
In naively believing that the craving addiction would never cross the border into their perfect little world, they subconsciously forgot to take into account the corruptible nature of human beings. That natural instinct to long for everything it isn’t meant or allowed to have, for better or for worse. A trait which most Notobians, as humans, shared and displayed. It was only natural then that, when the first big Kredits began to swarm in, Notobians should suddenly find that they could have anything they ever wanted, needed or didn’t. Everything that could be bought they bought, with little thought for anyone other than themselves. Notobia went on a perverted spending spree of sexual proportions. The list included despicable depravities in the order of outer-stellar gang-banging circles of fire holidays, intra-body linked technology, pre-ordered multi-limbed sexual slaves. Testicular steel implants, inter-anal spelunking, and a whole lot more. If one could think it up, another would name it, then price it, and they’d buy it. Have it posted to them, fuck it, and when they were done they’d chuck it, before realising they hadn’t quite had enough of it. And so the vicious circle would start again.
Kredits incidentally, and not Credits were the currency with which anything that was worth anything was paid for. Although few of the folks on the street level ever dwelt upon the issue, Kredits literally translated into a specific amount of TDCs (Third Degree Citizens) one owned and was allowed, or rather expected, to trade and abuse. In the past they had used gold, then paper. It was only a matter of time before man should back the currency they called money with human beings. Not ordinary beings, but the ones they defined as third class.
Kredits bought things and could be exchanged for those citizens who lived in the darkness of the underworld. A labyrinth world built among the ancient ruins of cities and towns of the past. Where the sewers and the rats ran in unison. Where the people struggled and starved, and took care of the disturbing issue of waste, among other things.
Waste disposal had unfortunately become a complicated and painful process in the years following the nation’s explosive growth. The initial remedy had been to propel the sewage directly into skies. Easily affordable and vast amounts of Lactobia hade made it possible to propel cheap, shit-stuffed rock
ets into outer space. An intergalactic bill from 1483 AMD (After the Melt Down) however made the disposal of faeces and any other kind of human waste into the open heavens of space highly illegal. There was, however, no law written, implemented, thought up of or other, to do anything to stop the horrendous force feeding of the lowest casts of society with shit. Literally shooting them dead by the dozen and dumping their shit swollen bodies into the void of space. A 100 tons of shit floating around in space meant a 12,000,000,000 Kredit fine and one hell of an anal headache, go figure that out. A dead body, on the other hand, filled with shit and floating around about Andromeda was just another issue for some local bureaucrat to sort out. Nothing too annoying. They called them floaters. Something flushed away that would never have to be dealt with again. Problem solved. No one ever referred to them officially but everyone knew exactly how it was done. Another rich family trip abroad. And as the space vehicle pushes through the last grips of gravity something thumps against the side of the hull.
“What was that sound daddy?”
“Nothing to worry about,” says daddy, “just some space debris.”
“There isn’t a problem a good erection can’t solve,” they used to claim. Interestingly enough the rape issue was never really fully addressed or solved. Authorities tried installing silicon quick fix dolls around inhabited areas in the hope that OrAngE-fevered individuals might attack the artificial victims instead of opting for their defenseless human counterparts made of muscles and feelings. There weren’t however enough dolls installed around the place to solve the problem. The wording in the laws got lost in an orgy of OrAngE fever and the question became whether a victim had consented or not to being raped. Consensual rape victims were frowned upon, but not as much as those who had tried to fight back. Somewhere along the line, something got lost in the mist of lunacy. What a place to bring up your kids.
erchapt
It wasn’t the cold weather, nor the mucus running down his face and freezing on his top lip, or the sore throat, the coughing. It was the dreaded feeling of failure, which sitting on the sidewalk caused a once honest working man to feel in the darkest corners of his bowels. Jack Landan had run out of nails to bite at, to feed off. His leather jacket wasn’t fit for human consumption. He wondered how human he still felt? How much of that basic instinct was still left in him. The days had begun to meld into a long nightmare followed by one long meltdown after another. He spent the nights wondering about the ghostly neighbourhoods of the underworld where the forgotten ones scraped a living. The dozing waking hours of day he passed begging for mercy and a little recognition on the sidewalks of the upper city.
Ever since his apartment giving up on him and the rabbit handing him the coloured pills, he’d roamed around among the rats, here and there, scavenging, surviving. For a few days he’d managed to live on what little Kredits he had left. Sleeping at the office, sneaking in after dark when the last cleaners were done, and napping under his desk. Hoping to wake up before the first colleagues came in for the morning shift. He’d lived that way for a few miserable days, until someone ratted him out. The fuckers. So they called him in for a meeting. Said he’d been letting them down lately. Weren’t they all? He told them he was just going through a hard couple of days. They thanked him for services rendered, handed him a cheque for twelve thousand Kredits, patted him on the back and showed him the door.
It had been three, four, perhaps six weeks. He wasn’t counting any longer. Not when all a day had become, was a miserable reminder of the undeniable fact that he wasn’t dead yet.
He stank like one of those rotting rats they cooked and served on the sidewalks of the underworld. But hey, he was free. Not a friend in the world, but then again he’d never had one. He spent the time observing. Taking mental notes. Wondering how it all fitted together. No matter how gloomy and grey it all looked, there was something inside him which still felt the need to hold on.
He’d been sitting at the same spot most of the morning. Watching the kids, the robotised pets and wives walking along, shopping bags in hand. He’d picked his spot carefully, hiding from the dreary eyes of the security cameras which surveyed every other inch of the place. Tucked away from the snow and acidy rain, yet still in sight of a few willing souls, his cup placed a couple of feet in front of him. Empty of course, but there was always hope. The shops had been open a couple of hours. The crowds were starting to pick up. They called them Current Booths, the latest craze. Where they spent the big money, where it all went down. Off bounds for under-sixteens, but he’d seen kids as little as four and five being dragged into them. Colourful stores with pretty girls in ridiculously high heels and florescent clothes welcoming unweary customers. It reminded him of those barber shops from back when. But these were no barber shops. There were seats alright. Cheap plastic coloured seats where they sat their untrained buttocks. Then those big fucking blenders, on small side tables, into which they would throw their hard earned cash.
Half a blender worth of Kredit notes got them a few minutes. A full one would stretch it a quarter of an hour. Anything longer tended to fry their brains to a pulp. He’d seen it happen a few times before. The bowels always gave in first. Awful trying to deal with a casualty amongst the engulfing stench of fresh shit. They never put that in the movies did they.
Pulling the chunks of bills out of their wallets and purses, their kids playing on the floor with miniature dildos and action-man rape-dolls, they dumped chunks of money into the blenders. Applying the electrodes to the sides of their heads and genitals and pressing the switch. Then it would start. The blender churning, and the paper soon turning to a mushy juice. Then, when it was ready, a tweaked electric current of OrAngE was pushed through the primitive circuit and violently up and through their brains. The ecstasy of an immediate high. A sexual kind of legalised pleasure for the rich (and famous). There were much more direct ways of getting a cheap high in the underworld. All sorts of ways.
Sexual intercourse between sweaty human beings, made of muscles and bones, had of course long been banned. He sat there watching, their bodies twitching under the colourful neon lights, their children occasionally looking up to a mother or a father caught in moments of full erection and total brain freeze disfunction. This is the future kids.
The froth and saliva collecting at the sides of their mouths. Some would over shoot the landing strip and would have to be helped to their feet. The OrAngE daze shining bright in their eyes and in the back rooms of their minds. Long enough to remind them that there was always going to be a little joy left in their lives as long as they had a few thousand Kredits left to blend.
The OrAngE Current Booth technology was a subtle spinoff of an antiquated military interrogation method. The procedure, however, seldom seemed to work on prisoners. Rather, it was reported to send them into instant gratifying bursts of ecstasy, before burning the fabric of their brains to an orange coloured dust. So when they figured there was nothing left in it for the military, some idea-ejaculating geezer sought to commercialised it. Where there’s money to be made, there always seems to be a way.
It fascinated Jack Landan to wondered how blurred the lines between what was fun and what just plain perversion had become. All that money. Blown shamelessly on bursts of mental ecstasy, before dragging their arses across town to fuck at the back of one of those robotic looking beauties, the android whores. It reminded him of an episode from his past. One he had transcribed to paper in the form of an entertaining short story in the days following the unfortunate event. It went something like this:
The sweat of passion always ran with an added fever on warm days. There was no escaping the scorching heat that the drug causes, as unwilling pints of blood are forcibly pumped into the ever growing penis. In rooms throughout the fabled brothel, men of all walks of life and strife pumped and humped, getting their pennies worth of the girls. Perfectly prefabricated pieces of artificial muscle, meat and bone at the mercy of a button-sized chip.
The sole algorithm of which is to slave to the sexual perversions of a perverted drug-induced mass.
The graphic menus, hung off the walls like expensive paintings. Figurative explanations of the array of twisted notions one could experience for the right price. Nothing was deemed to be beyond reach. In a world where money could buy anything, it was only a matter of keeping up with the demands. Gone were the days of unforgiving, beaten up girls, whose pimp’s sensitivities could so easily be offended. Any sadist’s dreams and desires were but a few button taps away.
Suddenly, among the sounds of leather straps slashing, knifes cutting and orifices ripping, the moaning and groaning, there came a scream of sheer terror from room 8. The oversized beer-belly gorging, sweaty figure of a disgrace had until a few seconds earlier, been enjoying a menu special number 7. The infamous “In-house Deep-Throat Lucky Number 7”. It would come to cost him more than he could ever have bargained for. Perhaps one long leap too deep, a shake of the wrist too many, a little beer accidentally dropped into the eye socket of the oblivious thing. Who knows. Something in it short-circuited and bit down with all its might before shutting down for good. Damaged goods could never be trusted. The bulging member, which had once belonged to the devastated looking figure of a man, was never recovered.
Jack Landan had bumped into the fellow in work a few weeks later. The black eye, courtesy of the brothel’s owner for damaging one of his precious dolls. The urinal bag, courtesy of his doctor and of the cyborg he had contributed to ruining. He did his business in a plastic bag from that day forth. No more OrAngE stuff for him. They’d never spoken. Never would. Looks were all he’d needed to convey his sense of condolence to the unfortunate colleague. And yet, Jack Landan could not help thinking there was some divine providence in it all.
Back to his present reality, holding his frozen arm up to a few passers-by in the hope for some change, he tried to look into their eyes but not one of them found it in themselves to exchange the look. Only a little girl dared look his way and smiled, before she too was pulled off into the distance. So he sat and watched as their money blended away.
He couldn’t help think how but a fraction of what they were wasting away would get him enough to buy a pencil, perhaps a little paper. Anything, so that he might at the very least get back to that which he missed most. Writing. And then perhaps he might finally be able to complete that damn novel of his. It plagued him, like a pain in the side. Then looking down to his side, under the layers of jumpers and shirts, he pulled at a nail that had found its way into his flesh. Writing would just have to wait. Until then, he could only hope and imagine. One day he would go back to Pazanna. Claim it as his own. Buy a big house by the sands and bath in the warm gelatinous like sea, floating aimlessly and enjoying the tepid warmth of its two suns. Feasting on the delicious local cuisine, and of course he’d write. Sitting on the beach, the local herb lit and smoking from the side of his mouth. And all the peace in the Universe with which to fulfill his destiny. Was that too much to ask for?
In the background, he noticed a deranged looking fellow in woman’s clothes. Barefoot, his hairy chest hanging out of the top of a pretty white dress and what looked like a wig, holding onto his head with difficulty. Brutally he pushed a young lady to the floor and began to kick at her head as if it were a ball. Jack Landan called out to him at once, as he struggled to pull himself to his feet. Her tender body jerked and twisted and quickly succumbed to the horrid violence before her attacker made off into the fog.
Not a heart beat skipped, not a change of pulse, as all around citizens marched on, to wherever they were going. Rushing over to the pool of blood to attend to her, Jack Landan could not help but notice that her shoes were gone.
GaZillioN zoRgA
terchap
All good things start some place, some time. This particular story began about the same time Jack Landan’s grandfather, a tall, muscular fellow known as Gazillion Zorga, made the perilous journey from Pazanna to planet Earth. Crossing a few constellations and a few road holes on his way to Notobia, where he, like many others like him, hoped to make his zillions, inflation permitting.
“Things were tough back then,” he would answer whenever Jack Landan asked him why he’d decided to leave it all behind. Truth is, Pazanna was a complicated and, to Earthling-bred-beings like Jack, illogical place to exist. Deep down though, Gazillion Zorga always remained fond of his roots and was proud to call himself a Pazannian. The same was true for Jack Landan.
A lot had changed on Pazanna since the days when his grandfather had left. New laws had since been passed, for example forcing all Pazannians to have their notorious third eyes removed. That mighty, natural selective mutation developed by the wizard-like mind of mother nature. A priceless genetic modification designed to keep one from being unnecessarily stabbed in the back by an overly zealous neighbour. There were only four known civilisations in the discovered Universe which had developed three organs of vision. Two were extinct and one was at war with itself and soon to be vaporised. The facts had pushed Pazanna into taking drastic measures to join the universe’s surviving status quo.
There was big money to be made by surgeons when the first laws were passed. Pazannians ran in their thousands to have their inconvenient third eyes removed. Day surgeries popped up all over town. And by a curious set of circumstances they were all owned by local organised crime syndicates. Community serving organisations that would re-sell the amputated organs to restaurants. These would then be passed them on as Kraptlap eyes with which they would cook the famous and frighteningly expensive Kraptlap eyeball soup with. (A Kraptlap is basically a six foot Pazannian rat). The mischievous ways of a few always seem to make the rest of us into oblivious cannibals.
The happening, or the coming of a new age, came to Pazanna around the time their first ever radio receiving gadget was invented. There was little or no recorded history of anything worthy of mention on the little blue planet before that one great invention. Just a dark mist of war and desperation that few ever acknowledged or cared to remember. A dark time during which the first Pazannians had started to grow their famous third eyes.
As far as Jack Landan was concerned there were two versions of the truth. The two realities could not have been farther apart. The first was a romantic account of a nation’s rise from darkness into the light of self-awareness that he had read of in books. A change, come of the magic of a communal spirit, prayer and divine intervention, a culmination of Panzannian’s collective will to become better beings. The second, his grandfather’s version, was that of a bloody fight to the death. A tale of centuries of violence, gore and battles to the last man. A tale which the hardened space pirate would recount to his grandson, conveniently altering truths and omitting the underlying violence. There’s nothing better than a good old bedtime story.
The invention, or perhaps discovery, of the radio was to their cultural development what the steam engine was to the industrial revolution back on Earth. It was the enlightenment and coming of the son of the Creator of all things Blue. All packed into one big collective explosion of madness and unquestioning obedience which would shape their future for generations to come.
Although he couldn’t recount every detail, Gazillion Zorga would tell it like he was reciting a gospel, (the way he’d learned it as a kid back home on Pazanna). The story went something like this:
For centuries, the small planet had struggled in war and misery, with famine and death, all in the darkness of uncertainty and ignorance. Until the day one man, known as “Uranius the Great”, put together the “Great Box” and channeled the words of the Creator herself. The great box of course being a primitive version of a so-called radio-wave-receiver.
He had worked on the mysterious sound box for decades on end. Inspired by a dream, which had come to him years before whilst on a government sponsored trip to the outer limits of their atmosphere. (Some claim he had travelled beyond.) On the night of the happening, a crowd of Pazannians g
athered around Uranius as he attempted, for the first time, to make contact with the heavens. The tale tells of how the masses gathered in bewilderment. Watching, captivated and baffled as Uranius twisted and turned the coloured knobs. Pressing away at the buttons and pulling at levers as it had been explained to him in his dream.
The smoke rose out of the back of the wondrously noisy thing that seemed to steam like an engine. Uranius the Great sat nervously before the contraption, the sweat falling from his big forehead which hid behind it the greatest mind ever created. Staring into the trivial monitor, hoping and praying for something, if ever so slight, to happen. Something, to show the people who had travelled so far and risked their lives to be there. If anything, he would have to show them something to avoid being lynched to a pulp by the masses. Anything less than a miracle would surely have spelt misery for the short, weekly framed individual whose notorious orange coloured third eye shone with the brightness of a star. It was one big rabbit they were expecting him to pull out of his hat.
His prayers were eventually answered, when all of a sudden, among the chatter of the crowds growing ever more impatient, among the ruffling sound of interspace static something happened that would blow them all out of their shriveled Pazannian skins. Their innocent souls and peanut-like brains could never have envisaged what was about to happen. One doubts Uranius himself dared imagine the blasting sound of space magic that he was about to unleash on his people. What they heard, through that demonic piece of technology, were the infernal chords to a song. Unknown and alien to the outer reaches of the Universe, and bound in due course to eventually make its way to planet Earth, where some still claim it first originated.
The radio signal which had travelled through the mysterious fabric of time and space had inexplicably become entangled in the small planet’s magnetic field, where it had orbited Pazanna for decades. Probably centuries, until that very dim afternoon when Uranius the Great reached out into the darkness of the Universe, and picked up the glorious notes of the famous rock song. A song which would some 200 years later be interpreted by a rock’n’roll band on good old Earth, (back in the days when the planet was still a sphere).
Such are the wondrous ways of the fabric of reality and time that we live in and share. Pity that it is all taken for granted. It begs the question of whom came first, the great song or the great band?
For centuries the lyrics, indecipherable to the average pentagonal shaped Pazannian ears, was all that the rudimentary radio receivers ever picked up. Playing the glorious notes of the looped signal of the dazzling song around the clock. 36 hours a day, 9 days a week. It was one hell of a space loop.
Not that the poor Pazannians could ever conceive of, or imagine the origin of the strange sounds. Pazannian astrology had until then limited itself to the purple skies which engulfed the little blue planet. No one had ever thought to question what lay beyond it. What reason could there possibly be to do so? As such there was no one able or willing to define whatever it was that the mysterious sound box was playing. All they could agree on was that it was heaven sent. From the skies it had come and as such it should be treated. That is what Uranius claimed, and they all went along with it quite happily. What had initially been the unwillingness to ask, would soon, under Uranius’ new ultra conservative regime, become the impossibility and illegality to know.