Dr. Treekenstein
Douglas H. Plumb
License Notes
You may share this book as much as you wish, but you may not change it's contents. You may copy and give it away, but you cannot sell it. PDF format is probably the most universal.
Power Outage was my first book. This one is way, way, way better, and its funny too, or at least I think so.
Copyright 2015 Douglas H. Plumb
EPUB ISBN: 9781311369277
Contents
1. Dr Treekenstein
2. Little Jimmy
3. Dr Know
4. The Intercranial Fusion Injector
5. The Holographic Generator Set
6. Little Jimmy's Ex Wife's Best Friend
7. The Lumberyard
8. Woodpile
9. Dr. Treekenstein's Palace
Literary Reference
1. Dr. Treekenstein
Way, way, way, way off into the future, in the year 3 428 127 P.C. (Post Computer)....
Water dripped onto Dr. Treekenstein's head from his leaky shack roof as he struggled for a few more minutes of late morning sleep. He finally gave up, woke up, climbed out of bed and began to get dressed. A little ball of light jumped up from his night table and danced to the synthetic music that filled the room. Dr. Treekenstein clapped his hands twice in the air and the little ball of light slowly spiraled down to its resting place, into a little puff of smoke, as it came to rest on his night table. The music stopped and the smoke dissipated.
It was time to go to work. Treekenstein went to his fridge and grabbed a bottle of cetula juice to take with him and ran out to his hovercraft, opened the canopy and jumped in. He turned the key and pulled the lever. The craft jumped around in the air a bit then slowly rested on the ground again. He tried it again, and again until the machine jumped into the air and hovered, waiting for a course to be plotted by its driver.
He pushed the work button. His aging and rusted hovercraft began to accelerate down the hoverway toward his work, accelerating to maximum speed, three hundred and forty seven point one miles per hour. Dr. Treekenstein enjoyed the view of dense bush and tree covered mountains as he lit his cetula pipe, took a long haul and thought about another long day at work.
He always knew how those men that he watched on the holographic generator set felt, when they climbed the highest mountain in the world and were a hundred feet from the top. He had the same feeling every afternoon around ten minutes before the buzzer went off at the end of the day. He wasn't missing a thing.
Some of the birds could be seen to fly away as Treekenstein, followed by some of his fellow workers, slowly hovered their way onto the hover lot, carved out of dense bush, buried in deep mountainous forest, in Region 17, what the ancients referred to as Western United States, to begin their workday as the saws were being fired up early Monday afternoon at Hore's lumberyard and sawmill.
Monday mornings and Friday afternoons had created too much distress and anxiousness and had been voted out as unscientific over three million years ago.
Dr. Treekenstein was the worlds most famous and illustrious tree sturgeon and had been out of a job since they recently started doing all tree sturgeries in Region 382, known as China by the ancients, or so he was told. It was found to be more efficient to uproot the injured trees, put their roots in water and hover them to Region 382 to be operated on, then hover them back to be replanted than it was to have fairly paid tree sturgeons such as Dr. Treekenstein repair them in their natural environments.
They spoke a living language and words continued to change their meaning for the amusement of Legalists long after they had completed their assault on the law, before the P.C. calender had started, in ancient times. Legalists needed work and they had the necessary clout to keep their jobs. The word surgeon referred to the then extinct primitive looking fish and the kinds of doctors that operated on trees, animals and people were now referred to as sturgeons.
It was illegal, with a threat of hefty fines and possible long prison sentences, to refer to licensed sturgeons as surgeons, all for the amusement and continued employment of the Legalists and their enforcers. Charges laid for offenses created an income for the ruling classes and enabled the debt slaves to pay homage to their masters.
Dr. Treekenstein, out of work for months, had eventually found himself working in the sawmill, and often smoking cetula leaves during his lunch hour and breaks, often laughing and making statements like "It's not what you read, it's what you smoke" and "anything that keeps you out of the asylum must be good for you.". He was the worlds most famous and illustrious tree sturgeon in his old life, but the highly motivated, accomplished, famous and illustrious tree sturgeon had grown old, gray, tired, frail and bored and now had to be ignited before he could explode.
Woodpile, one of his coworkers, who was usually just quiet and just laughed at everyone else's jokes, had come in anxious and worried that particular Monday afternoon, with the grand and much celebrated billionth copy of Regional Rock & Dirt magazine folded up under his arm. It had a picture of one of Treekenstein's former colleagues on the front cover as biological of the year.
He put it down on the lunch table as they all went off to work. Treekenstein looked over at him and wondered why he looked so worried, but it was Woodpile, so he thought it was probably nothing and soon shrugged it off as he went to work.
A half hour after they had started work, Woodpile told the group who sat around the table at lunch hour, which always started a half hour after they came in Monday afternoon, that he had read that 97% of the worlds scientists now believed trees to be extinct and that they would have to find a new way to build houses.
This made Woodpile very concerned, he had planned to build a house in the nearby town. How could he do this if there was no more wood? Woodpile asked his colleagues what they would do for work if the scientists said there were no more trees. No one had an answer. Some said they hoped to maybe go back to school and become police officers or soldiers to reinforce the Legalist's rule of words or catch people simulating Friday afternoons in the seconds after the buzzer, on their intercranial fusion devices.
He passed the magazine over to Chimney, who smoked continuously whenever he wasn't working and except for today, always sat with Dr. Treekenstein while Dr. Treekenstein smoked his cetula leaves and told satirical jokes of a desperate and broken man. They normally sat in the shade under a tree watching the others at the distant picnic table. Chimney had too noticed the desperate look on Woodpile's face as he came in that afternoon and decided to sit with the group at lunch instead of joining Dr. Treekenstein that day.
They passed the magazine around, each more shocked than the last, occasionally looking at the supervisory building and expecting a supervisor to come walking over with their end of employment paper work at any moment. Soon they would be terminated. If their were no more jobs, the termination hovercraft could be picking them up for an intercranial fusion for a new occupation or to be disposed of for lack of efficiency.
Dr. Treekenstein watched them with mild curiosity as they passed the magazine around and were actively discussing and pointing to an article that Woodpile had the pages folded over to expose. It wasn't enough to get the geriatric doctor up and over to the table.
During break, they called Treekenstein over and showed him the article. He looked at it for a few moments and then exclaimed "You guys hover through fifteen miles of wooded mountains and valleys to get here every day!". They all looked at him puzzled and finally Chimney spoke up "97 percent of scientists say the trees are extinct and here you are only one unemployed tree sturgeon telling us it's not true?" he paused while the others nodded in agreement, all looking at Treekentein. Stone, another coworker then spoke up "I count heads and these heads are
far greater in number than yours!". Treekenstein looked back in horror and in disbelief.
He had studied propaganda as a minor back in his junior intercranial fusion days. He had learned how this could happen in his abstract textbooks, but had never seen it realized. He looked back at them in disbelief, got up and turned around, walked back to the tree he was sitting under and lit up his cetula pipe once again.
"Let them sleep on it", he thought. Tomorrow morning while they hover into work they will look around the sides of the hoverways as they come in and see all the trees.
The next morning he saw Woodpile, Stone and Chimney, all with worried expressions on their faces, and all carrying magazines under their arms as they slowly walked into the mill. He wondered what they could be thinking now and decided to join them at lunch and just listen in to their conversations. They really just had to figure it out for themselves, he thought to himself.
Stone spoke up first, opening his magazine and showing everyone a graph of how the tree population had gone down to zero in one of the worlds most trusted scientific magazines. They all nodded in agreement, eyes wide and still shocked over the news. Chimney grabbed the magazine, got up and began walking over to the supervisor building. Woodpile jumped up and grabbed him "The sooner they know, the sooner we are terminated! Keep it under your