February 2180
“London, New York, Paris, Mumbai, Armstrong City, Bowie City, glory to the glory of Queen Gloryyyyyyyyyyyyannana!”
A montage of images appeared on the screen. She poured spaghetti and meatballs over the head of a chef. She was skiing down the Alps with a monkey on her shoulders. The monkey wore tiny goggles. The Queen was break-dancing in zero gravity with the cast of Tres Miserables. She was laughing as lemon meringue pie dripped down her face. She was riding an elephant with two of the guards from Buckingham Palace. She looked into the camera and coquettishly rubbed her finger over her plump lower lip.
Her theme song played:
“God save the Queen, she’s just stolen my heart…
God save the Queen because I’m trying not to fart!
She’s beautiful! She’s original!
Long may She rule over us all…
Yeah!
God save the Queen for just one more niIIIIIiiight…
God save the Queen just one more night…. Gloryannana!”
The band played on as the Queen emerged from behind a set of massive multi-colored curtains. The in-studio audience applauded thunderously as she began her monologue. She wore a white dress, and a hat which was shaped exactly like her. As she moved, the hat moved, echoing her movements.
“Meow! Meow!”
The crowd laughed.
“Meow, Bobby!”
A chubby and posh man with black hair and a fancy black moustache appeared on screen. He laughed.
“I had a dream last night that I was a cat.” the Queen said.
“A cat, Your Majesty?” her sidekick played along.
“Meowoar!” She shouted, and then jumped forward towards the in-studio audience. She feigned brandishing claws.
“We’ve got a great show tonight. Doctor David Aelfwyrd is here to talk about the future of the Mars colonies.”
The crowd applauded.
“ Comedian Wasqui Xeph is here.”
They clapped politely.
“And we have music from Life is Love.”
The crowd went wild.
“Sounds like we have some Life is Love fans here tonight, Bobby.”
The chubby man with the villainous moustache replied, “I believe they call themselves Love-heads, Your Majesty.”
“Love-heads, is that right?” She asked the audience.
They hooted. They hollered.
“We’ve got Bobby Withergrove.”
The camera focused on her sidekick. The crowd continued to applaud.
“And Jimmy Valvolovo and the Kick-ass-ateers! Jimmy?”
The house band began to play. The music was aggressive and futuristic. The camera focused on the Kick-Ass-ateers for a while. When it turned back to Gloryannana she had changed outfits. She now had a skimpy dress made of stardust. The sparkles clung to the shape of her body, and yet also seemed to hang here and there a few inches in front of her creating a 3D effect.
“Hello, Universe. Hello, everybody everywhere. I was thinking about you.” She laughed.
“We have a really historic show for you tonight. Something is going to change in the universe. The direction of the cosmos is being altered. Because of the events on this little telvidja program tonight, the human race is going to upgrade from a historical footnote into a mature and permanent piece of eternity. It will be our eternity, our nevereverending.”
“You are correct. We’ll be the gods now,” Bobby added. He then twisted his face up so that it looked like he was farting. A sound effect mimicking a massive expelling of air from his butt was played at the same moment. Confetti was launched out of a cannon behind him.
The crowd laughed.
“But first, more importantly, have you heard this? Did you hear? Cross my heart. McDonalds has announced that their locations on Mars are going to start serving old fashioned hamburgers again, made with real meat. This is true. “
“That sounds delicious!” Bobby added eagerly.
She laughed. “Bobby, have you ever even tasted synthetic meat?”
“I have! I mean, not lately, but I tried it once.”
They laughed.
“Anyway, they have announced that McDonalds locations will be serving real beef hamburgers in the new year. No word yet as to when they will be bringing back caffeine or high-fructose corn syrup…”
The crowd laughed.
“Or heroin!” Bobby added.
She laughed. “That’s right, Bobby, or heroin. Could you imagine? Hey, give me two happy meals and a Chasing the Dragon meal!”
They laughed.
“War continues in the former India. You know, Bobby, they say it’s going to take thousands of years for the radiation to subside, and there’s talk of another ionic exchange before Christmas.”
“Terrible,” her sidekick shook his head.
“Yes, this is serious. United President Goliath Breugger has said that he stands ready to send Congress over to help in any way they can. Including just lying in the radiation, maybe rolling around a little, just soaking it up?”
They applauded.
“Hey, Bobby, have you ever thought about what it would be like if our world was ruled by fruits and vegetables?”
The crowd laughed.
“Vegetables? My Queen, you mean like broccoli and tomatoes?”
The crowd laughed.
“I mean like broccoli and tomatoes and rutabaga and asparagus, and especially cumquats.”
“Constantly.”
They laughed hard.
“Cumquats, your grace?” Bobby was struggling to not burst into laughter. He looked like he might cry.
“Cumquats. Is something wrong, Bobby? You look… uncomfortable.”
“He wiped a tear away. It’s nothing, your grace. I just – just – I just had a cumquat in my eye.”
“Come with us as we examine what a world would be like, with humanity enslaved to a race of hyper-intelligent vegetables…”
An animated scene began. It was a preview for a new cartoon which featured a naked woman, a cow, a pig, and a chicken trapped in a world ruled by evil alien vegetables. The only one of the vegetables she trusted was a Cucumber named Cooko who fought against his own people. It was both zany and wacky. When it was finished, a link on the screen told the audience when they could catch new episodes of “Freedom Meat.”
Then the commercials rolled.
When the program returned, Queen Gloryannana had changed into a blue business suit. There was a lorikeet on her shoulder which she was feeding. Bobby sat on the couch next to her desk. They appeared to be talking. As the music faded, she seemed surprised to see the audience.
“There you are!” She looked thrilled. Millions of people felt like she was talking directly and individually to them. “My first guest is a good friend of mine. He’s a total genius. Please give a warm welcome to my shy friend, Doctor David Aelfwyrd!”
The curtains opened and Aelfwyrd walked out. The lights were bright and the crowd was overwhelming. He stood there half-frowning and half-smirking for a full five seconds. Finally, Bobby walked over and ushered him towards the Queen.
She descended, embraced him. He lifted up her hand and kissed her finger, bowed to the audience, and then they both sat down.
The queen held her just kissed hand up towards the camera. “I’ll never wash it again!”
“Then, I’d better not kiss you anywhere else…” Doctor Aelfwyrd mumbled.
The crowd laughed hysterically. He looked at them nervously. He looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
“David, darling. You’ve been living up on the red planet for yonks.”
“Yes.”
“Tell us what you’ve been doing.”
“Hu-humanity has to spread out into the universe. We have to. If we stay we’ll kill the Earth. We’ll kill ourselves. But imagine if we had two worlds. Imagine if we had twenty.”
“Twenty Earths?” The Queen looked shocked.
“Yes. Twenty. Or more. Some a little smaller, lik
e Mars, but perhaps some many times larger. It will bring in a new era of wealth. It will expand what we are, what we can dream about.”
“So, how do we do that? Terraforming?”
“No. Well, yes, we can do a little of that, but really we could wait a thousand years for Mars to be merely a terrible place to live. We need to change. We need to change the human race so that we can breathe Martian air, so that the radiation is good for us. Imagine if the dust were pleasant? What if the cold were nice? The planet Mars is smaller than the Earth, but there’s actually more dry land there.”
“Sounds lovely…” the Queen said sarcastically.
“You’d hate it. I hate it. But you and I have been engineered over billions of years for life on Earth. We aren’t suited for anywhere else. I have taken men and women – brave men and women - and evolved them for the fourth planet. There are families already living without any space suits, without any air tanks. They’re building farms and homes. The foundations of cities which will stand for millennia are being dug by people who can walk around the land of Mars just as happily as you or I could walk down the streets of London.”
“I hate walking,” Bobby harrumphed.
“Is it possible?” the Queen asked.
“It is already happening.”
A clip began to play. Beautiful and fit families were shown growing plants in the red soil. A lovely red-haired girl with strange eyes and flaps of skin over her nostrils smiled at the camera. “Me and my Mum like to grow apple trees. I love apples.”
A little boy spoke. “I want to try new McDonalds hamburgers.”
The camera focused on the Queen again. She had a new outfit on. The lorikeet was gone, but her clothes seemed to imitate the bird’s plumage.
“This is amazing! This is the biggest event since Leif Erickson discovered America!”
“It’s bigger than that, your Grace,” Bobby added.
“It’s the biggest event since the human brain developed its linguistic capacity, maybe the biggest since life began,” Aelfwyrd said calmly, without hesitation.
“Well. And how do the good people at home sign up for it? I’m sure there are many, many people living in their tight and cramped conapts simply dying to live a fancy free life on another world.”
Aelfwyrd replied. “This is a benefit offered exclusively and without charge to employees of the British Corporation with lifetime contracts. Applicants should go online and just send us their resumes and blood samples. We can find a place for almost anyone who is willing to work for a future. The process takes only a few weeks.”
“It’s that easy?” the Queen asked.
“It’s that easy,” Aelfwyrd replied.
8
PRESENT DAY
Once Aelfwyrd and Charlie were inside the building they barred the door and then laid a heavy statue of an elephant-man against it.
Aelfwyrd lean back against the wall and said to Charlie, “Do you believe in trolls?”
“Trolls?”
“Elves, trolls, magical creatures.”
“Like in fairy tales?” Charlie smirked.
Aelfwyrd smiled as well. “Yes, like in fairy tales, but I mean in the real world.”
“No. And before you ask, I don’t believe in Muppets or Smurfs either.”
“Aw, you should always believe in Gonzo the Great and Super-Grover. Anyway, my grandmother used to tell me that they were both real and imaginary. Then she’d lean back and try to read my face to see how I would process the contradiction.”
The monsters began banging on the outside of the door. It wasn’t loud, but it was constant.
“I never knew my grandmothers,” Charlie muttered as he looked around the room.
It had once been a circular showroom of statues and paintings, an entranceway into what looked like an apartment building. Majestic stairways led up and down. The artwork had been roughly moved all off to one side, as far as was practical. Instead, the room was full of large metal boxes, thick wires and tubes, and scientific equipment.
Aelfwyrd walked over to one of the machines and examined it more closely. “There are limits to our human brains. We are built to function in a specialized environment. On the savannah there was no need for concepts like infinity or an understanding of the sub-structure of reality. The truth is that the better we understand the nature of reality, the less it conforms to common sense.”
“What does that have to do with trolls?”
“Let me ask you, how old is the universe?”
“I don’t know. I think I read something like fourteen billion years.”
“And what caused it?”
“The Big Bang?”
Aelfwyrd laughed. “I forget how long ago you lived. Alright, fine. Let’s go with the Big Bang. So, what then caused the Big Bang?”
“God?”
“Maybe. Where did he come from?”
“He was always there.”
“Was he there for fourteen billion years?”
“Maybe.”
“A hundred billion?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was there ever a first day in God’s life, a day when he was born?”
Charlie frowned. “I don’t know, David. Is your point that it doesn’t make sense?”
“Yeah. That’s my point. Let me tell you, I studied physics for decades. The more you understand, the less it makes sense, and the reason is that we were never designed to grasp it. Using a human brain to understand reality is like using human lungs to breathe underwater. It doesn’t work well.”
“So trolls are real and imaginary?”
“Exactly. And I’ve never seen anything that I thought deserved to be described as a troll as well as those Mud Men. They’re actual monsters.”
Aelfwyrd picked up one of the wires and began following it down the stairs. Charlie followed. The level below was apparently the real laboratory. The air smelled of formaldehyde. A loud bubbling sound filled their ears.
“But they’re not imaginary,” said Charlie.
There were at least ten dead or unconscious Mud Men encased in transparent bubbling tubes. One of them appeared to have cancerous or mutated growths on his neck and chest. There were three long silver operating tables. The walls were covered with boxes of notes and books. Charlie opened one of the books at random. The pages were crinkled and used, dirty, but blank.
“Your notes are gone.” Charlie stated.
“Mmm. The ones I wrote down, sure. But my subjects are still here. I can see the progression; maybe understand what I was trying to do.”
“You changed the Mud Men, like you did the people on Mars.”
“I think so. Maybe we needed them to be able to survive in our environment, or maybe there’s more to it. I don’t need the books. I’ll be able to simply read the corpses.”
Charlie walked up to one of the tubes. The Mud-Man inside of it seemed to be twitching. He couldn’t be sure if that was the effect of the bubbles, or if it meant there was still life in the patient.
Aelfwyrd walked up behind him. “That’s one of the early ones. You see, his skin is almost translucent. That would be how they look on their homeworld, before we edited them.”
“This is terrible. We’re playing at being Gods.”
“Says the man who changed human society.”
“I don’t remember any of-“
Charlie was cut off. He felt the needle slip into his arm.
He turned around. Aelfwyrd had backed away, but was still holding the empty syringe.
“Why?”
Aelfwyrd smiled nervously. As Charlie began to stumble, there was a look of relief on the doctor’s face.