A Die Pose City

Jack’s dad, a doctor in the Ministry of Health like himself, once taught him that there were three certainties to life: one was that he was going to die, a hard pill to swallow, sure, but inevitable nonetheless, the second was that he was going to pay taxes, for the general benefit of the Utopia at least, and three, that he was going to get diabetes, if he lived long enough.

The pancreas, like the appendix, our nails, and our canine teeth, were evolutionary cast-offs--vestigial organs--simply hadn’t ever evolved to keep people alive much longer than forty, or at least that’s how the dogma at the medical university went.

But at the golden year of thirty three, looking at the results of his last analysis, growing a rummy feeling below the lower folds of his gut, he thought anew about his father’s old adage. Could Jack have made a mistake? He double checked his annotations through the visual rendering of his last patient’s spread-eagled vasculature, but couldn’t see any faults. A two-dimensional monitor surrounded by an alabaster white rim the same fiberglass shine as everything picobuilt throughout the world city, grew out from of the counter. The majority of Jack’s patients were considered healthy on the body to mass index, yet when Jack correlated their weight on the X-axis with the number and severity of their morbidities on the Y-axis, there was a clear, upward trend. So clear it was nearly logarithmic.

The most corporeally integrated at the far right of his graph--the hardy hearty common fellows--appeared to have an inordinately larger amount of physiological complications. While on the left side of the curve, the slim-fetishists that often fell dangerously below a hundred and twenty kilos, those violently anorexic one, seemed to be spared the worse kinds of ailments. His lightest patient, a slim-recluse of eighty-two kilos, almost forty, and she hadn’t ever needed a single dose of the universal-malaise drug, chewable INsulin^® . . . diametrically the opposite of what Jack had learned at the Ministry’s Med school. Indeed, weight loss usually indicated severe health problems like cancer or flesh-eating necrosis.

His patient data points stopped there, but if the trend continued further left, the number of morbidities would traverse the axis below 0. “Ugh,” Jack whispered to himself. How could that be possible? Contemporary medical records had little notion of what would happen if someone became so unhealthily thin. He tried to dig up files from the older historical systems.

Before the Utopia took care of all needs and garnered four thousand years of prosperous peace, there had been people--as the folklore went--that didn’t have continuous access to food, or even, Jove-forbid, water, nor unlimited access to endless masturbatory stimulants. Indeed, such troubling lives our ancestors had led.

There were a few rats at the Ministry’s disposal so Jack decided to start an experiment.

***

A week later he burst into his superior’s office, clammy sweat dripping down the plumpness of his face as he rolled in in an archaic, purely mechanical drone. “By Jove, have we lost power? What is it?” said the man who placed his pad on the large mountain of folds of his belly.

When Jack got his wind back, he told him about the correlation curve. “What if people got even lighter?”

“Oh preposterous, Jack,” he said, noting the few cases of dangerous anorexia in his patient files. “There would be no way a person could survive through adulthood at less than a hundred and fifty kilos. In fact, medical doctrine urges us to urgently increase their bio-integration. Why, a person in that state would go . . . oh, what was the word?”

“Starvation,” Jack tried, fresh from his history searches, he knew what his patron meant.

“No. Oh blasted Venus! What was that word?” Bob scratched between his chins. “Oh yes, hungry! that’s it, they would go outright hungry!”

“I--ugh, yes, I suppose that would be the first symptom, yes.”

“Terrible, terrible suffering, I would think. Likely to be completely and utterly unbearable.” Joysticking his crib to the replimat, he ordered, “Second brunch special number five.”

Jack licked his lips at the sight of Bob’s large pizza with extra cheese covered in loads of lime sauce (for color; the salty, creamy dressings all tasted the same). “You want anything?” he generously asked to serve Jack out of the credits from his own replimat. “Not even a juicy sweet-tart between snacks? . . . No? Oh, all right, but you really should try to get some skin on those bones, Jack. Think of the sex appeal you’d get. Right now, the women would say there’s just too little of you to love. Any lighter, you’ll hardly be able to find a date.”

He’d faced much worse skim-shaming than to take Bob’s comments as anything more than friendly encouragements. People can be so cruel, like when his neighbor had pointed to Jack’s chest, laughing, and asked when he would be man enough to grow a pair--that had been cruel--but he knew Bob never tried to be hurtful. He generally cared about his subordinates.

Jack hesitated before recounting what he did to the rats, but he had to. Jack told him how he took two cages, built one running wheel contraption that was rigged to a food dropper; the rat in cage 1 needed to complete twenty rotation of the running wheel before a food pellet was to be dropped, while the rat in cage 2 required only a lever to be pressed and had access to an unlimited amounts of food, but no running wheel, like every person alive today could cheaply benefit from the plentiful blessings available throughout this most bountiful Utopia.

“Oh, how utterly unethical. Besides, aren’t you finished with undergraduate research projects? You’re a fully licensed medical doctor now. Working with rats, by Jove. You can help humanity for the next two years before you’re forced into old-age retirement at thirty-five. You’ll regret it. Don’t waste your last good years, Jack.”

“But don’t you see what this data means? Look sir, the rat in cage one lived to almost two years in the accelerate growth chamber. That’s twice as long as the rat in cage two.”

“Bah, it makes no sense,” said the man a few months his senior and many dozen kilos his superior. “That rat had even less chance to integrate the nutrients than the rat in the other cage. How could less, be like more? No, I dare say, this makes no sense. It must be some artifact of the accelerated aging chamber.”

“But it would take years to perform without it.”

“Further unlikely the medical ethics board would even approve you to torture innocent rats like that. As you know, everyone is beautiful and perfect the way they are.”

“Yes, of course, and as was taught to everyone by the Ministry of Education, Self-Esteem, and Constructive Avarice. But see, that’s why I’m so perplexed.” Despite what his supervisor was telling him, Jack simply couldn’t abandon such startling evidence.

***

Two years later, a man who no one could recognize, or quite frankly fathom, arrived at the bottom of the architectural steps of the Ministry of Health. Where a traffic of land-drone assisted patrons were queued for the funicular to return, an erect figured stood. Whispers were growing to the man’s attention. Many stalks craned to see what the tiny wraith-of-a-person would do. Rumors abounded decibels.

The tiny, far-past-dangerously-anorexic person waived at the crowd, standing there on his own two feet like some rebellious neonate that was too stubborn to finally sit down; no better than some primitive, cave-dwelling primate! Flab on his belly shrunken so that his three nubs--indicative of masculine-like genitalia--were completely visible to everyone. Women (and a few men) with a propensity for extreme fetishist pornography groaned oddly titillated.

He put one foot atop the ornamental artwork, then lifted his whole body, unassisted, atop it. There he stood, taller than anyone lying in their life-sustaining drone carrier cribs. Then curiously, unbelievably, he went up another step, and kept going . . . up! The small figure looked winded, but continued this miraculous feat, feet and hands climbing even faster than the funicular.

Atop, the mysterious tiny wraith waived to the crowd and made his way to the entrance of the Ministry of Health. His name was Dr. Jack 211-358-980-β2.

Dumbfounded that he could have let this terrible tragedy ravage his system, those who then recognize him recoiled in horror. It looked like, rather than having assimilated more nutrients as advised, he had shed a good deal of his healthy girt. Jack used to be over one hundred and fifty kilos light, which had placed him at the life-threatening bottom of the healthy body/mass index; meaning that, even lower, nearly everyone of comparable physiology to Jack’s, were heavier. He had fallen completely below the curve.

Off the freaking graph!

In fact, it should be impossible for Jack to still be alive, let alone standing there. The senior medical fellows knew so and couldn’t clamp their dangling jaw folds shut. His former supervisor approached him within his drone crib and swung his rippling arm to touch Jack’s shoulder. With a gasp, withdrew his hand immediately.

“So warm! Feverish, he must be,” Bob proclaimed from the touch.

“No really, I feel quite well,” Jack argued.

“Climbing all the way up here, in your state and age I might add, you could have gotten a stroke. So thin, maybe you’re delirious.”

“Please, everyone,” Jack pleaded to the crowd. “I have some important new evidence.”

***

Two long, arduous years ago, old-man Jack set up the normal time experiment with five rats in each group. Each had its own cage. The test group had to work the wheel to get food while the control group ate without toilsome hurdles. Jack wasn’t such an insensitive guy, he wouldn’t do anything to a laboratory animal that he wasn’t prepared to suffer himself, so he manifested a human-equivalent device inside his slot at housing unit 56-994-C, which worked much in the same ways as the lodging for the rat, although, he thought, oftentimes the rat had it better, with room to spare.

“Where I could press and pull, with my hands. I needed to generate a proportionally equivalent amount of work, force over time that is, similar to what the rat had to do, before I could use my food and drug credits. A control group was easy because it already included everybody else.

“The first night I threw up, fainted, then threw up again using my own rotatory device I had to wind repeatedly so my food replimat would let me purchase food at slow increments. I realized how viciously cruel this experiment actually was, that I should have been much more generous in the work-to-food ratio, but I had had to start somewhere, and couldn’t really hear the rats complain, now could I? I had simply matched their metabolism. I vowed to put an end to the horrible experiment on the morrow, while I tried to soup the little gruel I could afford into my mouth with violently shaking hands.

“But upon waking the next morning, and still not having had the initiative or opportunity to undue the torture device in my slot, I realized that, despite being sore, I could still fulfill the energy requirement with greater ease than the previous day’s. How curious, I thought? Where I should have been badly weakened from my withdrawal. Only the minuscule amounts of nutrients I could assimilate shouldn’t have been enough, but I was instead, somehow, reinvigorated in the morning from the absence of it, and viciously motivated to boot.” All the necessary vitamins and minerals, lipids and proteins, sugars and nucleic acids were all supplemented into the replimats by the Utopia for us to enjoy to our heart’s content. Foods and drugs kept people healthy and complacent. Everyone ate as much as they pleased. Selfishness was a virtue. Consumption, an honorable civic duty.

“Couldn’t even produce enough jolts to afford all my favorite sedatives anymore. After about a week, I noted, but permitted, a drop of my weight, with that, I expected to lose much needed strength that my wide girt could give, as inertia to push against my torture device of course. But to the contrary, I seemed better adapted to use the muscles around my torso without even the need for drone assistance. I alternated the shape of the blocks so I could use different limbs to generate force by other means. After another week, my diabetes cleared up. My stunted pancreas had somehow been kick-started back into optimum insulin production again! Can you believe that?” This fact alone shocked his crowd into taking a necessary drone-click backwards to a safer distance, like he bore some contagious skinny-plague. Many guffawed their negations. 

Jack rebutted with what happened in the experiments. His supervisor Bob had been wrong; the accelerated aging chamber had worked perfectly well. The five rats that were tortured by running inside a wheel showed improvements on all metrics. The most startling fact about his experiments--once another doctor dared argue that the data might have been fabricated was that--if they didn’t believe him, they could check those animals for themselves. Incredibly, all the tortured rats were still alive! Two years later they showed some sure signs of old age, but they had outlasted the other group by more than double their lifespan. The thought that they could endure such horrible suffering for so long made one woman swoon; to avoid public hazard, her drone crib eased itself to the floor with automated control jets.

“A few weeks after that, I started feeling like I had even more energy and attention so I stopped spending my afternoons eating and masturbating like any regular, normal person is instructed to do, instead I started reading old historical records, even those before 2256 AD.” 2256 was the last year of the old calendar and the first year of the greatest social republic ever known to humanity, now in its 4013^th year. The early records were a little sloppy from the sun’s massive barrage of coronal ejections experienced during the first millennia. These issues had all been resolved and needn’t be investigated further as was instructed by the ministry of Education, Self--

“But those records are fragmentary, corrupted,” someone behind the first row of cribs shouted, startling Jack out of his reverie. He turned, but couldn’t see him behind the larger people’s pods.

“True, and usually worthless. Can you believe we used to inscribe data directly to metallic alloys and DNA computers, both of those primitive information storage mediums were easily disrupted by ionizing radiation. Can you believe that? It is a miracle we still can extract anything at all, really.” Jack cleared his throat to speak loudly enough. “But one unexpected side-effect of my massive weight loss was that my ability to focus on details, and my working memory to keep those details in mind, seems to have quintupled in capacity. It appears that a normal glycemic index impaired hippocampal memory integration, but in my previous, high-glycaemia state I never saw that, or was too stressed to see it, but functional brain imaging showed an increase in blood flow to my hippocampus as well as improved scores in classic mnemonic tests.”

Someone whispered, “Entirely unbelievable.”

“With this renewed focus, I was able to overlap copies of old digital files from different sources and correct the missing bits in the old medium, I made some rather startling finds.”

Bob pleaded with the mad wraith, “That there was a time on this planet, before the great Utopia, where chaotic wildlife grew in competition to humanity, and people went hungry and suffered quite deeply, this we already know from the Ministry of Ed--”

“Yes, I--ah, I assume, there were some of that too, long ago, but did you know the Earth had a natural satellite in the not-too-distant past?”

Some more whispers of disbelief. It was Bob who brought his crib closer to the miraculously erect man. “I think there was some gospel about a local asteroid in the old writings.” Trying to placate his old friend, calm him so the thin man wouldn’t faint or have some cerebral aneurysm.

“Before all the minerals were mined and converted into raw matter for the food replimats, that satellite, or asteroid as you so called it, which is long gone from our skies, was called Moon,” Jack continued undeterred. Pondered if that had anything to do with the ancient failure of the Earth’s magnetic field, before the solar deflectors were settled into orbit at Lagrange points to protect us from the mutagenic solar radiation?

This seemed to make Bob pause while he ran a finger between the folds of his cheeks, typical of him while deep in thought. “Reactive matter had to be extracted from somewhere, I suppose, but we have the entire asteroid belt left to us, and the hydrogen capture pods orbiting the sun, surely that would last us indefinitely.” Indeed it seemed astronomical quantities to Jack, but he was quite sure that their ancestors would have said the same thing about the Moon when mining had first started there. What if they continued at this rate of exponential growth? Then the entire asteroid belt, the outer planets, even the sun, would be consumed within only a few more population doubling times. Then what?   

A senior official, Gertrude, her magnificence, Primearch in the flesh, used an override app to part the cribs out of her way. She was regal, reveled at her impressive 550kg. Her salary wasn’t supposed to be much higher than Jack’s, but she was undoubtedly wealthy--or found herself in the sponsorship of a quinquagenarian sugar daddy--by the look of her skin grafts.

There were a few very-productive and high-ranking elites of society that simply didn’t have the time to chew food with their mouths, which had opted for an expensive type of digestive-cell cluster implants, in her case, covering a wide patch of her torso that could be used to assimilate nutrients more efficiently, more directly.

At the moment she was absorbing an expensive gourmet calf, brown hoofs twitching, protruding from the acrid smelling gape of skin that sphinctered around the bundle. These enhanced people also often had the advantage of having malleable bones, which they could reset at will following drone-assisted osteopathic surgery. As a result, her original shape was difficult to estimate, but two eyes clearly shone black through the folds above a gory mouth-slit much too wide, her arms had been stretched, were thrice as long as usual, and swung like pendulums.

She never gave Jack an opportunity to answer Bob. She said, “What you have said here today is pure sacrilege. How dare you question the Ministry of Health’s directives?”

“But, sir,” Jack argued, “Surely these results speak for themselves.”

“All I see is a sadistic animal torturer,” she said, “To think you could be so obtuse to believe you could know better than our very ministry, or even me! You should be incarcerated, neutered, and force fed back to a normal weight without delay. To think you could take responsibility for your health in your own hands, how utterly preposterous. Pfff.”

“No really, I feel much better like this,” he said, increasingly anxious. Then he spoke something that brought the situation to a dangerous climax. “Maybe medical standards weren’t supposed to be a based on what is normal, but what is potential, for the individual. Maybe humans weren’t meant to have everything they wanted granted to them without effort. Maybe that’s what’s truly unnatural.”

She shown red in loose islands of broken vasculature, the layers of her face seemed to vibrate. “How dare you?” she croaked, burped or gurgled--some gas escaped from somewhere, Jack couldn’t quite tell--then, like the small insect she thought he was, tried to swath him.

The large meaty appendage came at him with impressive speed. He ducked below the folds. Something soft and salty flopped against his forehead, but he was spared the worse of the swing.

Her long right limb, flung beyond her ability to control, crumpled around a marble pillar. After a cottony crackle of broken bones, she cried in pain at the sight of it. Cursed him that he did infringe upon her, but numerous witnesses saw that she had mostly done it to herself. Yet she wasn’t about to accept responsibility, like most leaders, no part of her personality could let things go, or bare feel defeated, she called for the guards whom were just as dumbfounded as how to react as everyone else.

Confused, one of them even tried to use his remote controller to arrest the tiny person who wasn’t riding a crib. But against the muscles that were human legs, his controller could do nothing more. Seeing the ineffectiveness, the guard instead joysticked his drone crib towards Jack, trying vainly to pin, or squash him. But Jack, seeing the five hundred kilos of fiberglass and flesh flying his way, ducked and ran. He circled pillars and evaded the other guards whose wide chariots couldn’t turn sharply enough, or easily fit in the artful crevices which Jack could easily traverse in his minuscule form. “I dare say, come out of there you, you tiny hooligan!” One of them even produced an electrified lasso typically used on non-compliant farm animals that occasionally escaped their dinner patches.

Then Jack did something utterly astounding.

While the enthralled medical professionals stared at the circling guards, Jack bent low, then raised his body fast. In one instant, both of his feet departed from the ground. Nothing, no drone--electrical or mechanical, nor any support structure of any kind--was holding him up. Nearing apogee, gravity was about to take its course and everyone watched with dread, sure his skinny frame would fall into a fractured pile of bones.

The cable swung languidly beneath his feet; the guard crashed his crib into the wall so singularly focused was he on his lasso. Then, like they had never left the ground, both soles of Jack feet lightly returned to the marble without any broken limb or twisted joint.

He stood still, on two legs.

The silence following the drone crash was ominous. But Jack had had enough. While they tried to regain their comfortable seating, aided by medical assistance drones into their respective cribs, he took the occasion to flee.  

***

Bob found Jack where he thought he might. He asked Jack who stood facing two accelerated aging tanks. Jack welcomed him without concern that a police team might be awaiting outside.

“You made quite the impression the other day.”

“Am I to be imprisoned,” Jack asked, but his tone didn’t seem to care one way or another.

“I don’t think so,” he said, then giggled. “Not today, anyways.”

The Primearch’s heart stopped, from implacable anger it was determined. “Said while we were entertaining your ideas, that we would be cursed to live as primitive animals. That was what we would become.” Then she fainted for the last time and her drone auto-piloted her to her preferred funeral home so her atoms could be ionized into plasma and recycled for the greater glory and everlasting brilliance of this Utopia. “Could still hear the poor calf’s bleating as her corpse was flown away. Might be fortunate enough to live another day, to become another rich bloke’s breakfast though I would think.”

“So they’ll take my results into consideration?” He turned from the monitor to get a better look at Bob’s facial expressions. His thick, bald brows were brimming wide with excitement.

“Yes, you could say that. When you danced and moved and . . . jumped--yes that’s the word--they couldn’t believe their eyes, but they couldn’t dismiss it either. Moving so swiftly on your own, freely avoiding all known apprehension methods with animal agility, probably made more of an impact than all your data combined.”

Figures, Jack sighed.

“We brought the motion to Fruitcake.”

Jack held his breath; the social computer hadn’t permitted any new implementation for over five centuries. The AI’s reticence was generally accepted to mean that social contentment had been nearly maximized and anything further risked only making it worse, or in other words, that the Utopia approached so close to perfection that no further changes were warranted.

“The council voted in favor, even the most fervent supporters of orthodoxy thought it was a good idea, for the AI to quickly shoot down the idea I think, but, only, it didn’t. Fruitcake decided to implement your system for the next four weeks, then help us decide from there. Like you said, we wrote it so no one could prematurely stop the civil order until they started to feel some level of delayed benefit, like you described. If nothing good comes of it, and the world needlessly suffers because of your crazy ideas, Jack, you’ll likely be publicly executed. That’s what fruitcake recommended to quell the masses and prevent a riot, which hasn’t happened in over a thousand years in this beautiful Utopia, might I remind you.” He paused to dab off some sweat with a pink gaboid. “You understand, don’t you? But if everyone’s health improves to the same degree yours did, we might unearth a whole new paradigm in medicine here.” Bob was overly excited, had to take a short breather. “By Jove Jack, we’ll likely get the Nibble prize for this,” he wheezed.

We, thought Jack? He understood then that it must have been Bob who spearheaded the idea past the Primearch’s wide-reaching influence and her thralls of rigid supporters of orthodoxy. Well, half would be better than no prize at all, thought Jack, though Bob wouldn’t be the one losing his skinny behind if this went awry.

“A social experiment,” Jack said of his new research project to who he had wrongly assumed was his former boss. This time, Jack had placed a group of rats in each cage instead of single housing to see the effects. “Utterly horrendous,” he said after a while. It seems that in every cage where he tried this social experiment, one rat would remain large, eat most of the food, and rarely ever run the wheel. The others took time suffering the exercise mechanism to some degree. Three of the five were of a substantially lower weight, showing that they ate less, and inevitably, one of them--the poor pitiable thing--became so skinny his bones could be seen in its tail and ribs. Eventually the largest, or smallest, would die (indeed there was such a thing as too little nutrients, Jack felt dismal to discover the obvious the hard way), and the next largest rat would take the dominant position in the hierarchy until it died or out-ate one of the smaller ones; never did they share the food or workload equally.

“Well, primitive animals can be much cruller than people,” Bob tried to reassure Jack’s sour face. It wasn’t reassurance Jack wanted; he knew his results were sound; it was that he didn’t quite believe people were much different than farm animals anymore. “Surely citizens would be much more equitable.”

***

Given that Bob was elected to Primearch they were offered to view the live social metrics broadcast from the Central Ministry’s Headquarters. Jack programmed a smaller customized drone to help with the occasional biological need.

As he hopped atop his drone platform, he said, “One of the downsides of being so thin is that you always know when I’m taking a piss.” They both laughed as Bob joysticked his hovering crib aside to avoid any accidental splash-backs. The Creche^® hardware simply wasn’t adequate to handle such a tiny frame, and externally protruding genitalia, like Jack’s.

Shortly thereafter the metrics started to come in. As they feared, a great number of people--almost one-tenth of one-percent--chose to take their own lives rather than try to suffer through the new tyrannical measures forced upon them.

Jack was about to start pulling at his loose skin, but Bob said, “So far so good, we anticipated much worse.”

But it had only just begun. 

Millions of angry e-letters flew @ their personal e-boxes. Even Bob, struggling with his exercise device he had assumed he would have easily mastered, was beginning to stare at Jack with his angry, hairless brows.

This was going to be a long first day.

After returning from a mind-clearing walk--an unheard-of past-time, that he thought could become a new social trend--Jack found Bob in a grip of a panic attack trying to open the mainframe computer to counteract the new social orders. They both knew that that was impossible from here, and only the master overseer intelligence, FRUITCAKE^©, could do anything about it. Bob was no programmer to boot. He would just get himself electrocuted.

Bob complained that he was dying, but Jack quickly determined that that wasn’t the case. With utmost patience, he helped his friend through the night.

But Bob was still grumpy the next day.

“Just do the rotations then you can eat and rest. By Jove, stop pestering me for minor issues. We need to help the rest of the world cope,” Jack said with a lengthy sigh.

Bob seemed to realize the colossal bias in his personal suffering, took a deep breath and willed his giant arms to push the damn spinning blocks--so he could eat--and then have the energy to help the rest of the world, of course.

“Good, good,” Jack told him then caught the readings he had feared. “Look here,” he told the central computer more than Bob. A few individuals, randomly selected through the world-metropolis for observation, continued to be discontent even after having apparently done the necessary work, but something was off. One of these suspect’s neighbor seemed to be producing twice the necessary energy--poor fellow--because, a closer infrastructure analysis showed, the suspect had slaved his wires to the neighbor's exercise device, forcing him to do twice the work before either replimat produced. Other fellows seemed to be receiving an inordinate amount of new visitors, each, it turns out, would perform the necessary work in recompense for money; another paid in copious sexual favors; and a third loaned his chambers, four times the size and twice the height of a usual slot, to the tenant who would power his replimat without him ever producing a sweat. Indeed people were cheating and if this continued, surreptitious replimat workouts would become a black market commodity. Groups of ever skinnier victims would hustle or be coerced into anorexia so a rich few could continue to eat as much as they wanted.

“We need to make an adjustment,” Jack told Bob and the master computer. It waited to determine if anything Jack said required a response; typical omniscient intelligence Jack sighed. “That the DNA, or the proteins from the skin and sweat of the user is adjusted to the appropriate owner’s replimat, so no one else could power their devices.” It took a few too many seconds for a powerful computer, deep within its multiple layers of triaxial crystalline jelly, which Jack assumed an answer as asinine as “Does not computer” or “NON SEQUITUR” would have appeared already.

But it did respond.

The master computer cryptically indicated: Amendment Implemented.

Two for two, FRUITCAKE^© agreed with Jack’s idea again. He cheered, tried to hug Bob whom tried to resist and instead spun his bald head away for an exercise-induced bout of lime-colored, emetic eruption.

***

After Bob got through his darkest first weeks--and that he and Jack were friends anew--they met again in the old lab. “We’re through the worse,” he said to Jack, about himself, about the world.

“Yes, I think so, or at least it’ll continue to improve.”

“You think you’re better than the rest of us in that tiny body of yours?” Bob asked him, staring at him with envy in his eyes, bitterness still flavoring his voice.

“No, I can’t say that,” Jack said, “All I can say is that I’m better than I was. I know the difference, because I lived through both, for me, I know it’s true. For you, I don’t know. I can show you the way, but you’ll have to do the work. Determine if that’s worth it for yourself. You might still have a long and hard struggle before you can walk around and climb things like I do. But I think . . . it’s worth it.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Bob started, craned his head to have a good look at the place, “I suffer. I feel hunger every day. Lost thirty kilos. But, by Jove, I think, I think . . . deep down, somewhere, I do feel better.”

“I’ve stopped torturing rats,” Jack confessed, assuming Bob was curious about a new experiment. “I did my part, the rats did theirs.”

“How do you think this all started?” Bob asked after a pause. Jack shrugged, but tried to contemplate the historical data he had uncovered with his clearer mind. How the Ministry of Health could have gone so astray?

“Who knows,” Jack started, “Could have been agricultural greed, a social computer error, could be the brain-activity pacifying and memory suppressing fungal parasites I found growing in everyone’s glucose-rich blood streams, could be plain food addiction, once that was called gluttony, I believe.”

“Ugh, um, yes, all possible, er? What was that you said about the brain parasites?”

Jack simply smiled. “Just keep up the work routine, my friend. I think everything’ll be fine.” He squeezed Bob’s shoulder and was pleased to find some rigidity there. “Oh, you didn’t interrupt me; I was trying to uncover the historically dreaded F-word. Not sure if it’s three or four letters, though.”

“Yes, by Jove, I think I’ve heard about that.” Bob handed him a portable screen. “Ever since I chose to spend my meager calories solely for food instead of painkillers that I used so my bedsores wouldn’t itch, I’ve been crawling around more and doing work. And guess what else I’ve found.”

Jack looked at the file. “Crech^® Ultra 400kg+ stock shares?”

“Yes,” Bob said with raised eyebrows, then a little disappointing that Jack hadn’t made the connection already. “As it appears, Gertrude, the former primearch held a succulent, very juicy steak in the matter.” Jack waited. “It appears the honorable former primearch had been pleading with Fruitcake for quite some time. It had constantly resisted her input, of course. Been requesting it to raise the average body weight ratio again, if that had happened, people would have followed the public guidelines and eventually would be in need of larger cribs, to her financial advantage every time one was picobuilt.”

“Oh, by Jove, that’s a conflict of interest. Blatant corruption!”

“Yes, it appears it had been ongoing for many generations too. It’ll surely take several years to unfurl how far back it goes.”

 “Oh, and even more interesting!”

Jack’s eyebrows rose in anticipation.

“Did you know, my bedsores went away on their own, simply form me not lying around so much. I don’t need to buy so many drugs anymore.”

“Oh, dashing Venus, that’ll saves a load.” They nodded, enjoyed the warm evening breeze. 

Bob then asked, “So Jack, what are you going to do now?”

That was an easy one. “Why, my dear friend, I’m going to enjoy my retirement.”

THE END

Bio: Jason works in Toronto as a research associate trying to uncover novel treatments for neurodevelopmental disorders. In writing, he greedily grasps deep into the unknown and sometimes giggles at awkward times.

E-mail: Jason Arsenault

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