The Stories of Zarni....

[Zarni]

i hope k-man doesn't mind me making my own thread for this i just didn't want my stories clogging up your other threads.

here's a little 'comedy' thing i through together a few years ago. tell me what you think!

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The Unethical Mistake

Stan Bigmore was a very orthodox atheist. His disbelief in any god, deity or other such superior entity was greater than that of anyone else he knew of. He was even a regular and devoted attendant of the ‘Church of Atheism’, founded by himself, run by himself, and, for the moment, with a congregation of one: himself. But it would grow, he knew it. You can imagine his horror, then, when he woke up one morning to a nice feminine voice telling him that he no longer existed as a functioning being in the land of the living, but not to worry, because he would now be boarding the 10:55 to Eden Central - sorry about the half-hour delay - oh, and please mind the doors. It was at this point that Stan realised that life was not, as is common public opinion, peachy, but it is, in fact, pear-shaped. Maybe the fact that he had gone to sleep as a 74 year old man and woken up at the tender age of 26 may have helped him to his conclusion faster, but, unfortunately, Stan was not the observant type.
Stan Bigmore was dead.
So, rather nonplussed by this new and unexpected turn of events, he had complied with the requests in the trance-like state common among newlydeads.
But now he was merely bored. He had spoken to Newton, Einstein and Kelvin, and found them all incredibly dull. Einstein had rewritten his Laws of Relativity, this time allowing for faster-than-light travel, and it was all he talked about, apart from his arguments with Hitler that no, he wasn’t a traitor, and that Hitler was in fact a very naughty man.
There wasn’t that much to do in Heaven. He had talked to all his relatives right back to the Dark Ages, and found that most of them couldn’t speak English. It was ironic to discover that the Tower of Babel ‘miracle’ had been so effective that even when dead, everyone still spoke the language or languages they had spoken when living. As a result, most of the several million billion people in the infinity of Heaven couldn’t understand a word of what the others were saying.
But it wasn’t just humans who inhabited Heaven. A multitude of animals and ‘Other Strange Thyngs Of The Darker Dimensions’ crawled, slithered, swarmed or otherwise moved around the ground, water, and skies of their respective Quarters of Heaven. There was even the odd Demon visiting on a winter holiday, although these were rare, as most of them found the climate too cold for their liking.
The most annoying thing about Heaven was the angels that wandered around trying to befriend the residents. So much for rest in peace, thought Stan, as he walked through the gardens of Buckingham Palace. All they seemed to want to do was talk about what your life had been like; having never had one themselves, this was a topic that always greatly interested them. He walked through the high garden wall and into the Oval Office. That was one good thing about Heaven: the entire Earth, past, present and future, was only a thought-command away. One only needed to picture in their mind the place he or she wanted to be, and the place appeared. And it wasn’t just Earth that was available in full colour, with smells, touch and everything else the brochure said. A multitude of alien worlds could also be called into being. But still, Stan Bigmore was bored.
An angel was floating across to him now, carefully keeping to the confines of the walls, floor and ceiling; they were all human inventions, and all angels were very eager to be as human as was paraphysically possible. They looked a bit like the traditional image of a ghost. They were humanoid, but milky in colour and translucent. They were also mostly taller than the average human, and many wanted to be like humans so badly that they actually moulded clothes onto their otherwise uncovered bodies. This one was no exception. He was about six foot tall, and ‘wearing’ blue designer jeans, a Nike t-shirt and a baseball cap on backwards. Nathan Forrest rode past on a large motorcycle yelling “Retard!” at the melancholy angel. He drove through the President’s desk and disappeared into the floor.
The angel sniffed, and Stan felt a bit of sympathy for it; after all, it couldn’t help having no friends and being a reject, could it?
“Don’t worry,” he said to the pathetic snivelling entity before him, “he won’t hurt you. (Hmm. Note to self: try not to make a public humiliation of yourself by making blatantly obvious statements.) He just needs to get that sock off his head and get an afterlife, as it were.”
The angel brightened up a bit at this, and with all the finesse of a shy five year old said, “What’s your name?”
“Stan.”
“Would you like to be my friend, Stan?”
Stan almost heard himself adding a lisp (or, to be more precise, a ‘lithp’) and a shrill piercing tone to the angel’s last two questions. It was only by sheer power of will that he stopped himself from cracking up with laughter at this point. This wasn’t exactly your typical view of an angel. They were meant to be powerful beings of four faces, or strange, naked chubby little children with wings and abnormal anatomies, not nervous wrecks who desperately tried to be cool like a new kid in a popular primary school. Sigmund Freud would have had a marvellous time here; correction, probably was having a marvellous time here. The entire situation was quite amusing, really.
With the air of one who knows he’s condemning himself to hell but commits the crime anyway, Stan said, “I suppose so. What’s your name?”
He felt rather foolish as the angel replied, after a moment’s hesitation, “Eric.”
There was an uneasy silence as there often is when one has just made friends in the traditional manner of a six year old. Then,
“Know any decent pubs?” asked Stan, in a blokey kind of way.
“Pubs?” Eric looked bemused.
“Forget it.” Stan sighed.
He tried again, “Do you know anything good to do here?”
“Golf is cool,” answered Eric hopefully.
Luckily we will never know what could have happened next, as at that minute there was an announcement over the P.A. system which was tactfully concealed but present throughout the whole of Heaven.
“Will a Mr. Stan Bigmore please report to Reception. Stan Bigmore to Reception, thank you.”
The fuzzy blocked-nose voice came as quite a relief to an exasperated ‘Mr. Stan Bigmore’, and he had to apologise to Eric for the interruption and make his way to Reception, which was situated at the front desk, just follow the blue arrows.
The receptionist greeted him with a rueful smile on her angelic face. Her name tag proclaimed her to be ‘Julie - Happy To Help.’
“Stan Bigmore?”
“Yep.”
“I’m very sorry. One of your cousins, Steve Bigmore, has-” she wiped a tear from her eye- “he was reborn a few hours ago. When we were looking through his belongings we found this,” she handed him a small envelope addressed to ‘Stan Bigmore’. Stan sighed. It looked like old ‘Shady’ couldn’t resist leaving him a useless inheritance, again.
“We assumed that this meant you after checking through our records,” she finished.
Stan thought about this for a minute, and then remarked, “Couldn’t you just have kept it? I mean, he’s going to die again sooner or later.”
“Well,” said Julie, knowingly, “that’s the problem nowadays. We reckon they’ll be discovering a cure for aging down there any century now.”
“Hmm.” Stan started to walk off.
As he went, Julie yelled after him, “Always happy to help! Have a nice day!”
Stan clicked his fingers. There was a rather pathetic rubbing noise. He swore quietly to himself. He never could do that. It hadn’t mattered though; his feeble attempt had called into being a luxury suite from the Washington D.C. Hilton. He collapsed into a very comfortable armchair and studied the envelope with a sceptical expression. He pulled a letter opener out of a lamp shade and proceeded to use it. He shook the open envelope, and a cinema ticket fell out. It was followed by a bath tub, a fully grown sperm wale, a hat stand and a postman. The latter took one look at him and ran off screaming into the thick pile carpet, which seemed to have grown an extra half-metre since he had first entered.
By this time he was feeling slightly bemused. He scratched his head and looked at the mess on the rug. He sneezed, and it vanished. Cautiously, he tipped the envelope upside down and peered inside. There was a square piece of yellow acrylic and a folded sheet of paper taped to the interior. He pulled the acrylic out, and found there was writing etched onto one side of it. It read, ‘I, God, hereby entitle the bearer of this blessed parchment to ONE audience with Myself, your Lord.’ There was then a signature of about twenty letters which burned-but-didn’t-burn with a flaming green glow as he looked at it. He peered at it from several different angles, hoping that it may reveal its secret under a closer scrutiny. Eventually he just gave it up, and turned to the bit of paper. He unfolded it, and started to read, rather laboriously at first, the words written on it in neat squiggles:

[Zarni]

Dear Stan, I meant to write to you sooner but I’ve just been busy. If you are actually reading this, it means that I’m alive and you’re dead (you lucky devil!). Please stop it all! I don’t want to live through all that again! If you’ll allow the metaphor, it’s Hell! I have managed to get my hands on an appointment slip for God for you to use, so use it. I don’t care what you do, just get me out of this so called ‘Land of the Living’!
I have included along with this letter all my most personal and favourite belongings for you to take care of. In case you were wondering, there was a dog which came with the postman. They were part of a set, but I lost the dog when it ran off into a thick pile carpet. The whale is called Timmy and he needs to eat fried cod and smoked salmon three times a day. And don’t forget to tickle him behind the blowhole every now and then; he likes that.
Thanks,
Your’s nicely, Steve ‘Shady’ Bigmore.
Stan’s forehead wrinkled as he attempted to make sense of all this. Finally he threw it all onto the floor and pretended to sleep for nine and a half hours.

God metaphorically sat in his metaphorical chair behind his metaphorical desk in his metaphorical office and sighed, metaphorically. The metaphorical buzzer metaphorically buzzed.
“YES?”
“Another appointment for you, Lord. Former human, male, by the name of Stan Bigmore.”
“SEND HIM IN.”
He metaphorically leaned back in his chair, metaphorically stretched, and rubbed metaphorical eyes with metaphorical sausages. Sausages? What were sausages doing here? Growling metaphorically, He changed them back into fingers. The big double doors creaked open slowly, admitting a rather nervous looking Stan Bigmore into the ‘office.’ Another one of these ones, was it then. Fine.
Stan stood there twiddling his thumbs and gazing with a half hidden awe at the great metaphorical being sitting metaphorically in the chair behind the desk-that-wasn’t-really-a-desk in front of him.
“WELL?”
“Um...”
“WHAT IS TO BE THE PURPOSE OF THIS MEETING?”
“Um...I have an um...appointment with you, Lord?”
“OBVIOUSLY SO. AND PLEASE, CALL ME HASHEM. OR POSSIBLY ALLAH, DEPENDING ON YOUR RELIGION. THIS WHOLE ‘LORD GOD’ BUSINESS IS SO FORMAL.”
Stan calmed down a bit now, and said, in a voice not quite as shaky as it had been, “My ‘appointment slip’ said it was a piece of parchment. Um....It isn’t.”
He produced the square of yellow acrylic.
“I RAN OUT OF HOLY PARCHMENT. DOES IT BOTHER YOU?”
“No, not at all!” said Stan, hurriedly.
“DO YOU HAVE A SPECIFIC QUESTION FOR ME?”
The idea came to Stan in, as it were, a flash of divine inspiration: “Yes: why?”
“IS THAT A GENERALISED ‘WHY’?”
“Yes.”
“BOREDOM IS A VERY POWERFUL DRIVING FORCE, STAN. IT EATS AT YOU LIKE A SNAKE. AND WHEN ONE HAS ETERNITY TO BE BORED IN, THAT'S A VERY BIG SNAKE.”
“Would that be anything like the snake in the garden of Eden?”
“IF THAT IS HOW YOU WISH TO LOOK AT IT.”
Stan was suddenly struck with a remembrance of one his childhood questions. It was the one which had turned him away from all godly religions in disgust.
“When Adam and Eve were first made, they were the only humans in existence, right?”
“STRICTLY SPEAKING, YES.”
“In that case, when they had children, those children were forced to commit incest to reproduce and continue the human race! I don’t call that a very good start for a sentient species! Especially an ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ race like humanity!”
“AT THAT TIME, THERE WERE NO LAWS FOR THEM TO BREAK, AS I HAD NOT YET GIVEN THEM ANY,” Hashem countered.
“I’m sorry, but that’s not a very good excuse. If I recall correctly, You then proceeded to punish the humans very severely for doing other crimes like that in the times of Noah. You hadn’t given them any laws at that point, either, yet You still punished them for committing crimes that didn’t yet exist! And making Cain, Able, Seth and co. commit incest isn’t a very good example to set for their descendants, is it? It’s no wonder that they thought it was all right to sleep with their neighbour’s wife, steal their neighbours cattle and kill their neighbour’s grandmother! There ain’t no justice!”
“HMM...YOU MAY HAVE A POINT. I SHALL CONSIDER YOUR VIEWS AND, IF YOU’RE LUCKY, I MAY GET BACK TO YOU.”

Stan Bigmore left with the satisfied feeling that he had argued his point to the highest authority possible and won. He was very pleased with the idea that he had out-thought God.

Back in his metaphorical office, God was thinking quite intensely. Stan had had a point. If this got out, that a former human had argued Him to a standstill, there would be, to coin a phrase, all Hell to pay. Well, those mistakes wouldn’t be made again. It had been good while it lasted, but all toys have to be thrown away eventually. As He picked a metaphorical piece of dirt from underneath His metaphorical fingernail, Reality began to unwind around Him. As He flicked the bit of dirt away, His chair dissolved as if never there, and He floated alone in a vast emptiness which was His now-clean blackboard. It had been getting too messy, anyway...

Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. And God said:
“LET THERE BE LIGHT.”
As a torch appeared in His metaphorical hand, He said, “STILL GOT THE KNACK. EVEN A GOD HAS TO SEE WHAT HE’S DOING...”

-END-

[K Man]

Sorry Zarni for not replying... I'm a bad person like that sometimes.

I like this story, it also reads very much like Terry Prachett (Spelling?) or even a short, comical Neil Gaiman. Conincidently, my favorite living author.

I also like that fact that it's sort of...'In your face.' It could offend many religious people and sometimes that is needed. Not that I endorse the offense, but I think it's good that we live in a world where we can see art that might offend.

I would format it to read a bit easier on the web though, kinda hard on the eyes with no breaks.

I also like the subtle references to historical figures and the like, especially Einstein's re-worked theory of relativity.

Very well done.

Good to see you're still around as well.

[Zarni]

thanks for the input!
it could be quite offensive, yes, but that's why we all need a sense of humour. as it happens i am a very religious person myself, but it doesn't mean i don't question things. that's very important, i feel.
i'll post you another if you like, and i'll try to deal with the breaks, it wasn't originally written for the web, obviously...

[Zarni]

this next story is one of which i am particularly proud. those who have read have seemed to like it

Lenin's Bees.[/i][/u]

“So Bert, what d’you think of communism?”

“Well Fred, the dynamics of politics really are beyond my modest comprehension, but if I were to voice an opinion on the subject, I would have to say that, when one considers the seemingly corrupt capitalist regime inherent in America at present which seems to rely on a society which cares not for its separate parts, communism as an ideal involving the society run by, and therefore caring for, its individuals would appear a very attractive policy to any developing nation in today’s globalised civilisation. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ It’s a most enticing concept.”

“Erm…yeah,” Fred scratched his rear in an intellectual manner and burped twice to show he knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Bees are ’appy today,” he said, observing the bustle and activity of the several thousand little bees busily collecting the pollen from the multitude of trees and flowers in the neighbouring orchard before ferrying it back to the layered white hive at the end of Bert’s spacious garden.

“I believe they sense, with specialised organs far superior to those of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, that a favourable temperature gradient is descending on our fair land and dispelling the far from pleasant climate conditions we have been enduring as of late,” replied Bert.

Fred looked up the sky and its distinct lack of clouds. “Ain’t rained for a while, ’as it?”

“Not since last Thursday.”

“It would ’ave to ’ave been a Thursday, wouldn’t it? Never could get the ’ang of Thursdays. Still, looks like the weather’s improving.”

“That’s precisely what I was attempting to vocalise to you!” said Bert, vociferating in a slightly aggravated tone.

“Yeah,” agreed Fred, in a distracted manner. And then, after a slight pause, “’Ere, Bert, what d’you reckon the bees are thinking?”

Bert looked up from the interesting patch of dirt on his shoes which he had been inspecting carefully. He didn’t like it when Fred got all philosophical like this. Life was much better, and simpler, when he was the clever one and Fred was the thick one. It had always worked for Laurel and Hardy.

“They have such small minds that I shouldn’t have thought much went on in them at all, my dear friend,” explained Bert, hurriedly. “They operate on the principle of a hive mind, each serving the queen as they are ordered in a hierarchy. Much like Margaret Thatcher’s government, except for the fact that the bees like their queen.”

“Well, yeah, but still, you find yourself wondering whether or not they can hear us, ain’t it? And, are they influenced in any way by what we say, y’know? Do our concepts of communism and capitalism mean anything to them? I mean, would they look up to Lenin or to Hitler? And, like, do they even know who Margaret Thatcher is?” Fred persisted.

“More importantly, Fred, do they care? The bees can’t hear us or even see us in our range of the spectrum. Now, get a move on, there’s a lovely pile of manure around the back of the potting shed which is in desperate need of distributing, and I want the task brought to a conclusion before late evening cocoa,” finished Bert, changing the subject somewhat hastily.

“Awright, Bert, let’s spread yer muck,” said Fred, with the air of one who knows he is making a commitment he will regret later on in the day. Marriage, for example.

With this, the two men moved on from the challenging task of observing the hive and proceeded to get up close and personal with a decidedly large pile of filth which had been dumped in Bert’s garden.



The bees, however, had not been entirely oblivious to this exchange. Throughout the nooks and crannies of the Hive, word began to spread amongst the workers: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’……



“Fred, I observed something most odd yesterday when I was monitoring activity amongst the bees. There appears to be a small group of bees which leaves the rest of the swarm when collecting pollen and goes off on its own, before rejoining the rest later in the day with little or no pollen.”

“S’funny,” said Fred, looking over the fence into the orchard in which the bees were, as per usual, crawling into flowers like little Waitrose lorries driving into their depots for loading. Seconds later, they were emerging like full little Waitrose lorries and making their way haphazardly back towards the hive, with little or no respect for other users of the air. Just like Waitrose lorries.

“No, actually they don’t seem to be participating in that unusual activity at this present moment in time,” noted Bert.

And then, as will always happen in clichéd tales such as this, a modestly large group of bees split off from the rest and, inconspicuously, headed off in completely the opposite direction. When they reached what appeared to be a prearranged spot, slightly above and to the right of the left ear hole of a nearby sheep in the next field, they all formed a floating sphere around one bee and simply hovered there, in formation.

Fred scratched his groin thoughtfully. “Maybe they’re ’avin’ a congress,’ he suggested, tentatively.

“Do not be preposterous,’ replied Bert, ‘how could that ever be possible within the confines of their hive mind, ultimately controlled by the queen?” he squinted at the static sphere. “The group appears to be larger today than it was yesterday,” he noted with interest.

“Could be a school outing,” put in Fred, in a casual manner, “or a team buildin’ exercise.”

“That has to be the most excessive quantity of bovine excretion I have ever heard uttered by an individual,” announced Bert calmly, with a level of uncaring nonchalance normally only attained by the English upper class, the American government when approached with an environmental concern, and the Irish. He often found that this tone of indifference served very well to suppress Fred’s intellect below the level of his own, and hence enhance his own sense of security. It was better for both of them this way, he told himself.

They continued to watch, curiously, each with the air of one who is pretending, for the benefit of the other, that they do not in fact have any interest whatsoever in whatever it is they just happen to be watching. Eventually, a rhythmic pulse of buzzing began to emanate from the sphere, and it began to spin, slowly at first, and then gradually gathering speed. It was at this point that a large bee, not a part of the revolving sphere, flew erratically towards the group. As it did so, the sphere stopped rotating and split up into its component pieces, which then dissipated and started being Waitrose lorries again - rather hastily, it seemed to the onlookers.

Fred and Bert stared gormlessly into the field for a short while, and then shrugged and went off to watch taped reruns of the Antiques Roadshow.

[Zarni]

The Hive was buzzing loudly with the surge in activity brought on by the approaching summer, but something wasn’t right. The Queen uneasily placed today’s batch of eggs in their cells in the honeycomb of the Hive, the workers were uneasily busy collecting pollen, and the drones, as usual, did sod all, but uneasily today. Since The Conversation had been overheard by one ambitious young worker three days ago, a growing number of similarly minded little bees had been meeting Outside instead of visiting the flowers to which they had been assigned. What they discussed, or rather, what was told to them by the ambitious little bee, was scandalous.

“The drones have it easy, they don’t have to work hard like we do….”

“All the Queen does is eat and lay eggs….”

“I’ve heard that it’s the Queen’s fault we can’t reproduce….”

“We deserve more…..”

“What do we need a Queen for anyway….?”

And her audience was growing. What she preached was, of course, the very same bovine excretion of which Bert was referring to earlier, but, as has been proved time and again by countless politicians, The People are suckers for a smiling face telling them what they want to hear. As a result, by the fifth day after The Enlightening provided by the Overhearing of The Conversation, some fifty thousand bees, nearly all of the Hive’s total population of workers, had fallen in with the ambitious bee and her closest followers. But that ‘ambitious bee’ was no longer satisfied with the label she had been given by our hapless narrative. She took for herself the name she had heard used by the Bringers of Workers’ Enlightenment; she called herself Bert, Keeper of Knowledge and User of Long and Complicated Words. To her second in command she gave the name Fred, Spreader of Muck, and her many followers called themselves Margaret Thatcher’s Government, for no discernable reason.

Such were the events in the days leading up to the Great Revolution.



“‘Ere, Bert, there ain’t many bees actually collectin’ pollen, is there?”

“No,” replied Bert, “it is a most intriguing occurrence. Look, in certain areas of the orchard, there are spherical groups of bees similar, if not identical, to the group we observed in the field two days ago. They now seem to be meeting, if this is indeed what they are participating in, with much less secrecy. You are correct, there are few, if any, bees gathering pollen today.”

“That’s a bad sign, ain’t it?”

“Indeed it is,” said Bert, grimly.



Neither of the two humans had quite managed to fathom the true extent and severity of the situation. Even now the army of Bert, Keeper of Knowledge and User of Long and Complicated Words, for this is what the rag tag group of bees following her preaching had become, were beginning to advance on the Hive with one aim in their tiny little minds: revolution. They entered their white, stacked Hive buzzing louder than usual, and killed every drone they came across. The colony was better off without them, as they never did any work anyway, went the reasoning. Finally the workers converged on the Queen, who was cowering in the centre, and a bloody battle took place.

In this case the workers were at a bit of a disadvantage, as the Queen was more than capable of defending herself in a way the lethargic drones were not. She had a sting, but it would not be pulled from her body, taking with it a large percentage of her vital internal organs, when she used it. Such was the case in the situation of the kamikaze attackers. Eventually, though, sheer weight of numbers triumphed, and the workers pulled back, victorious, to count their losses.

It was at this point that Bert, Keeper of Knowledge and User of Long and Complicated Words, and her closest followers, who had valiantly comprised the rearguard of the army, intent on heroically protecting the bees at the back end of the swarm, came forward to assert their dominance. Under the orders of Bert, from now on known as The Enlightened One, ‘The Worker’s State’ was established within the Hive. In this State, she, the humble and hardworking Bert, was to be the ‘Prime Spreader of Enlightenment’; or, to put it another way, In Charge. Following good historical tradition, all drone and queen larvae in the colony were immediately slain, and only the worker larvae were fed and allowed to grow to adulthood.

And, for a while, there was contentment in the Hive.



“Fred, have you cast your optical receptors over this state of affairs?”

Blank look.

“Have you seen what’s happening over here?”

“Oh, no I ’aven’t,” replied Fred, the light of comprehension suddenly coming on in his eyes like the electricity company finally fixing the cables; both welcome sights to Bert.

Lying in the grass surrounding the colony were the bodies of thousands of drones and worker bees.

“What’s so unusual about that?” asked Fred, “the worker bees always drive the drones out of the ’ive eventually. Must be ’coz they sit around all day on their lazy fat backsides and don’t do nothing.”

“But Fred, the workers only drive the drones out in the autumn, when they become a liability and a burden on the rest of the colony. Why should they do it now?” replied Bert, getting slightly agitated now that Fred was, in his turn, being nonchalant.

“Dunno. P’raps the drones was gettin’ to be a lia-wassit-fingy earlier than normal,” Fred reasoned.

“But they haven’t mated with the Queen yet this year!” protested Bert. Mating with the Queen was a drone’s only purpose in life; this may have been another reason why they were hated as much as they were: all workers were sterile.

Fred just shrugged and looked on. Managing the hive wasn’t really his responsibility. After all, he was just a farm hand.

Their attitudes might have been somewhat different had they spotted the body of the colony’s Queen lying amongst those of her slain subjects.

[Zarni]

And so the bees of the Hive were subjected to the communist rule of the Worker’s State. It wasn’t communism in theory, of course, but communism as it is so often practised in the real world. That is to say, ‘What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own, so get your filthy mits off it or I’ll blow your brains out.’ As neither the Queen nor the drones actually contributed much to the everyday running of the Hive, things continued as normal. Pollen and nectar were collected, the honeycomb structure of the Hive was maintained and expanded, and the eggs laid by the Queen were hatched out.

However, all was not well in paradise, to recycle an already coined and well-used phrase. The Enlightened One now felt the need for protection, and so she drew unto herself the largest bees in the colony in which everyone was now equal, and formed her own personal bodyguard. They were promised time off from what were referred to as ‘the menial tasks of other lesser bees, who are, of course, all equal’ if they performed her wishes.

With this group of strong-arm bees assembled and escorting her everywhere she went, The Enlightened One began to issue orders for slightly over-ambitious projects. An example was the construction of a completely irrelevant new wall within the Hive, which would separate The Enlightened One and such privileged bees as her personal guard from all the other equal bees who didn’t matter.

They didn’t seem to mind, though, as they were no longer compelled to do that task they considered a waste of time: the feeding of the Queen with a gooey substance known as ‘royal jelly’, which the workers secreted from glands in their heads. That in itself was an improvement in their lifestyles, even if it was the only one.

And so it was that the serpent entered the Garden of Eden.



“It appears that the situation we were experiencing formerly with the bees has now concluded. Everything has returned to normal,” observed Bert, happily.

“Er, Bert, don’t count your Antiques Roadshow episodes ‘til they’re all taped or sumink,” said Fred, and pointed into the field, where even now a large sphere of bees was moving through the air, surrounding one bee. Wherever they went, the activities of the other bees seemed suddenly to increase. In fact, it almost appeared as if the other bees were acting on unheard orders, or doing the sphere’s bidding in some way.

“Oh faeces.”



By a startling co-incidence, ‘faeces’ was just the thought which went through The Enlightened One’s mind when she realised the impact the latest development would have on her ‘management’. It was the third day since the revolution, and the last of the larvae were hatching from their cells in the honeycomb of the Hive. They were, of course, all workers; all the drone and queen larvae had been killed in the aftermath of the take-over, under her own orders. And therein lay the problem. There were no more eggs to be laid: they had killed the Queen, and all workers were sterile. Even if they had had fertile females, they had killed all the male drones as well, and it took two to tango. As a result, workers were dying without being replaced. The continuation of her Worker’s State was in serious doubt. So The Enlightened One did the only thing she realistically could do. She covered it up.

What she couldn’t cover up, though, was the decline in the production of honey due to the fact that her personal guard consumed but didn’t produce the necessary pollen and nectar. There were also fewer workers in the field, and less gathering of pollen and nectar as a result. Alongside the deaths of many and increasing numbers of workers was the fact that much of the Hive’s remaining workforce was occupied with building The Enlightened One’s ‘Irrelevant Wall’. The decline in the number of younger workers meant that more of the older and more experienced bees who should have been in the field had to do the everyday tasks needed to ensure the continuation and maintenance of the Hive.

And she saw this, and it was not good.



“Bert?”

“Yes?”

“Where’s all the bees?”

The two of them stood by the fence gazing forlornly over into the orchard, and looking like something from Snoopy’s nightmares. It was painfully obvious that there were very few bees to be seen anywhere.

“I wish I knew, my friend,” sighed Bert. “The honey yield is also down. I don’t know what is going on in that hive, it is as chaotic as a Labour Government,” he confessed.



As it turned out, even the bees were at a bit of a loss to explain their current situation. Some bees were beginning to become dissatisfied with The Enlightened One’s queen-like ‘management’, and thought that the Worker’s State hadn’t turned out to be quite as good as had been expected. They called themselves The Labour Government, and they were ‘Miffed’, that is: ‘Not Entirely Happy With The Way Things In General Were Going’. They grew in numbers quite quickly, without a leader, but all with a strong sense that something was ‘Not Quite Right’. Through word of mouth and buzz of wing, news spread among this anarchic group that an attempt would be made at counter-revolution; The Enlightened One’s rule would be ended, and any bee who had a prior engagement with Aunt Bessie for tea would have to make other arrangements with her or miss out.

‘Revolution, Tonight, Sunset.
Bee There Or Bee Square.

And so it came to pass that most of the Hive rose up against The Enlightened One and her close followers and personal guard. After demolishing the Irrelevant Wall, they surrounded the Prime Spreader of Enlightenment and her cronies and, after a short but casualty-fraught battle, killed them all.

Now more bodies littered the grass like so much pepper on a mouldy pizza, but it was only a forerunner to the chaos that was to be seen about the Hive itself. With the passing of the communist rule had gone the passing of the Hive; bees in their hundreds, their numbers drastically reduced by old age, war and Bad Planning, milled around in the air looking for someone to tell them what to do. But it was a fruitless search. Without reproductive capabilities, there was no chance of ever gaining reproductive capabilities, and without gaining reproductive capabilities there was no way the hive could continue. The Queen had been the proverbial life and soul of the Party, and now she was no more.

Eventually, leaderless, lost and confused, each bee went her own way, and so the remainder of the colony dissolved into turmoil, abandoning that which they had once striven so hard to protect.



“What a mess.”

“Ay, ’tis.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Dunno.”

Fred and Bert looked down at the hive, half of which wasn’t there. There were few bees to be seen, and those there were lacked the normal air of busy activity one always saw in honeybees with a purpose in life. These appeared to have no purpose; their home had been destroyed.

“What do you believe could possibly have happened here? The hive is destroyed!”

“Could ’ave bin a fox, I’spose,” Fred suggested, helpfully.

Bert shrugged. Disheartened, they set about clearing up the wreckage.

“So Bert, what d’you think of capitalism?”


-END-

[K Man]

Again, well done Zarni. Glad to have you grace the boards.

Have you ever been published? You have and excellent sight for thesaurical terms in your writing, something I've been trying to work on.

The story was good, reminds me of an episode of 'The Outer Limits' where a guy brings back from soil from mars and finds there are microscopic creatures living in it. They build a replica of his face in the side of their anthill and follow his political ramblings. Of course that story was different because the ant/things broke free and killed everyone...but you get the jist.

Again, well done.

[Zarni]

thanks! i aspire to your level of written proficiency
want a science fiction one next?
(*thinks* we should try and breathe some life back into the round robin story...)

[Zarni]

here's a sci-fi offering with a religious element.
this is the last one i'll be posting, as the others are far too long, they'd need about 8 postings, and i'm afraid i just haven't got the patience

enjoy:

Where The Spirit Dwells.

The old man could not be mistaken for a stereotypical anything. He was short, as much as I could see of him, as he was sitting down at a table in the near-crowded railway carriage of the 19:55 to Glasgow Central. His hair was a brilliant orange colour, but showed obvious signs of starting to turn grey, and it was fashioned in a neat army crewcut which emphasised his unusually flat cranium. His half moon glasses were perched precariously on the bridge of his dwarfish, rounded nose, and from behind them, wary deep brown eyes peeked out at the world. The seat next to him was vacant, which may not have been much of a surprise, given the fact that his clothes were quite dishevelled and that most of the other occupants of our carriage were businessmen; not rich or particularly wealthy, but certainly well off enough to feel the need to ignore him. The term that came to mind to describe him was ‘distinguished tramp’, if such a person could exist.

“Is this seat taken?” I asked him, just to be sure.

He shook his head absently, and I sat down next to him, as it was the end of the day, and I was tired and my legs hurt. I really wasn’t bothered who I sat next to right then. I tucked my briefcase under the table and glanced at the old man.

He sat there, gazing out of the window into the darkened skies of the winter’s evening. Outside the snow was falling at quite a rapid rate as the train clattered along through the cold, bleak twilight.

Then the man looked up at me, as even sitting down I must have been about a foot taller than him, and there was a cautious but intelligent gleam which gave me a start at first, for I had no idea any man’s stare could be so intense.

He mumbled something.

“Pardon?” I said, “I thought you said something.”

The man looked at me mischievously.

“P’raps I did, p’raps I didn’t,” he replied, “Who’s asking?”

“Thomas Blite,” I introduced myself, and noted a vibrant Welsh accent in the old man’s voice.

“Dr. Henry Assad. PhD, you know.” He extended a grubby hand gloved in a rag which ended at his fingers, and I shook it firmly, a grip which he returned with at least equal strength.

“What exactly is your PhD in?” I inquired of him.

“Biology. I graduated at Oxford, you know,” he said, with obvious pride.

I was taking my Masters degree in organic chemistry at Edinburgh University at the time, and told him so, with my own hint of pride.

“I hope eventually to do a PhD as well,” I told him.

“Good luck. It’s not easy, but it is very rewarding when you finally complete your studies.”

I nodded in agreement, and we sat in silence for a few minutes.

"I have a personal interest in the work of Gregor Mendel,” I said, in an attempt to ease the initial tension. “I find it very interesting to note that he did such revolutionary work, but that until 35 years after his work was published it was all totally overlooked by the scientific community. I think it’s because of the fact that he was a monk, and everyone knows that science and religion don’t mix. Especially not back then.”

“I used to be a religious man in my youth,” mused Dr. Assad, “I was quite a devout Muslim in those days.”

I raised my eyebrows. He certainly didn’t look like a Muslim.

“My father married a Welsh convert, you see, and I was brought up in Newport,” he said by way of explanation.

“I see, so what changed your view?” I asked, genuinely interested.

“Now that’s a long story. Do you have the time?”

“The journey’s long enough. I suppose I could make time,” I smiled.

“Well, in that case, it started ten years ago, when I was fresh out of university with my degree. I was still a practising Muslim, and quite a strict one at that. I had always been fascinated by the concept of the soul, that eternal part of every person which continues after death. The thing which has always puzzled me has been where the soul actually is in the human body. All the bigger parts of the anatomy have been disproved, so I decided to go small when doing my search...

“My theory was that the chromosomes of the cell nuclei hold the key to the hiding place of the elusive soul. Three years before, you see, Watson and Crick had announced their findings regarding their discovery of the DNA molecule, and this had caught my curiosity at once, and no doubt influenced my actions which followed.”

“It’s an interesting hypothesis,” I said, “but have you any proof?”

“Consider, if you will, that people inherit traits from their parents by the chromosomes, but of course only the inborn characteristics are passed on. Many, in fact most, people who have a religion are born into that religion, so that genetic line is, barring inter-marriage, continued. In other words, I think that in some cases, religion is an inborn characteristic.

“There are 46 chromosomes in the human genome, and two of these are the sex chromosomes. We know that the female chromosome pair is XX, and the male pair is XY. I worked on the assumption that one or more of the 46 is almost the same in all humans. I won’t bore you with the details of my research, but it all came down to the fact that the one chromosome which would always be there is the X chromosome in the sex pair...”

He looked around him, as if suddenly embarrassed by the topic of conversation, or paranoid about eavesdroppers, but I was the only one listening to him, so he continued.

“As soon as I had left university, I started my research into the field of genetic engineering, hoping to find some way to prove, or at least disprove my theory.

“Ever since my childhood I have been interested in the works of Isaac Asimov, and his robot novels and short stories in particular. But whereas he concerned himself with artificial life of the mechanical type, I thought it may be possible to create an artificial human.”

By this time I had become quite enraptured by Dr. Assad’s story, and the idea of artificial human life had never occurred to me as a possible option in any type of science at this point in time.

“I was able to get hold of samples of human eggs and sperm through my own sources, and set to work analysing the eggs. As we already know, the egg will always contain an X chromosome, whereas the sperm may have an X or a Y chromosome. Whatever happens, there will always be an X chromosome in the human genome.

“At this point I was working in my own improvised lab in my flat on the grounds of Oxford University, as they had let me stay for my scientific research. The equipment was supplied from them and from my father, who was an official at the Ministry of Defence right up until his death two years ago.”

He fell silent for a moment, and sat very still, a faraway look in those startlingly deep brown eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said in sympathy.

“Don’t be,” he replied, “I got over it at the time, and as long as I put it behind me I’ll be all right.

“As I was saying,” he continued, “after many failed attempts I managed to change the chromosome of the egg by a transplanting technique which is too complicated to explain in less than several hours. I changed it from an X chromosome to a Y chromosome.”

[Zarni]

I gasped in surprise. At this point it had become apparent that the man sitting next to me was a genius. It was also clear that he was quite insane. Who could tell what a child of YY sex chromosomes might be like? My suspicions were confirmed when he said,

“I then selected sperm samples which were of the Y chromosomes, and mixed them with the altered eggs. Three became fertilised, and I kept them in specialised incubators. They grew into embryos, then developed to the foetal stage. I lost one at that period, but the other two were still healthy.”

“What were their genders?” I asked.

“They were male, as far as I could tell at that point in their growth. The only thing that distanced them from a normal male child was that, even at that stage, their masculine features were incredibly prominent.”

I thought about this for a minute, then said, “When you consider the X chromosome to be distinctly feminine and the Y chromosome to be distinctly masculine I suppose that’s not surprising. Unlike normal male foetuses, they wouldn’t have any hint of femininity at all, so their male features would appear more prominent.”

He nodded. “That’s the same conclusion I came to. Another strange thing was that they had reached the stage of birth only seven months after fertilisation. Anyway, I brought them out of their incubators, and my wife Yasmin and I raised them as our own children. We called them John and Ibrahim. They turned out to be more trouble than they were worth...


* * *



John and Ibrahim had been fighting again. Although only four years old in normal terms, they had the bodies and mentalities of at least seven year olds, and they were very violent and seemed to have super-human strength. This time there were two broken vases and a table had been snapped in two like a thin piece of plywood. John had a black eye, but Henry winced when he saw what had happened to Ibrahim’s leg; they’d have to do something about it as soon as possible, although it didn’t seem to be bothering him. That was the amazing thing about this pair: not only did they show no signs of compassion, mercy, love, co-operation or consideration for others, they didn’t seem to feel any pain either. John was swearing loudly when Henry walked through the door and saw the carnage. He sat down in the chair beside the door of their suburban Oxford home and wept silently.

“Yasmin! Where are you? Yasmin!” he yelled to his wife,

He walked through the house strongly rebuking the boys as he went. They yelled obscenities back at him. He finally found her in their bedroom, crouching in front of an open cupboard with her arms inside it.

“Ah, there you are. Have you seen what the children have done this time? What are we going to do about them? They’ve always been like this, though, and that’s the whole problem. I know boys will be boys, but this is really ridiculous...”

He trailed off, as there was no reply from his wife. In fact, there had been no response to his presence at all...


From that moment on, Henry knew that the children had to go, and that all records of their existence must be destroyed. But how to eliminate the perfect child warriors - those with no mercy, no sense of right or wrong? He contacted his father to let him know of the situation.

“The MOD may be able to do something if I manage to convince them that these children are a national security risk. I’ll try, and I hope for your sake that I succeed. Especially if they’re as volatile and hostile as you say they are.”


Henry’s father never did say whether or not he had succeeded. As it happened, John and Ibrahim were mysteriously abducted three months later. They were first knocked unconscious on a deserted country road where they were walking, and then driven off in a car. Speed camera images of their assailant were never identified by local or international police, and no bodies were found. Although the entire occurrence was witnessed by a farmer who lived nearby, he also vanished inexplicably soon after, before he could be questioned. Neither the kidnapper nor the children were seen again, and the whole affair was quietly covered up.

Dr. Henry Assad disappeared shortly after the incident, and most people said this was due to the trauma he suffered after losing both his wife and his children. All records of John and Ibrahim were wiped; they never existed.



* * *



“...and here I am today,” concluded Dr. Assad. “The boys were devils, I am sure of it. So that is why I say that the X chromosome in the sex pair holds the soul inside of it. As both of the boys were YY, they had no soul, no sense of right or wrong. No pity, no love for anything and no shame. They were merciless demons, devoid of ethics and morality. They didn’t care about anything, and every attribute that is classed as a male characteristic they had twice over, with no female traits to counter them. I had created monsters.”

I nodded, not quite sure whether to believe him or not. So I said nothing, and we sat in silence, while he brooded amongst his private shelves of memories. He got off at the next stop, and as he stepped onto the platform, I saw a group of six policeman surround him and cart him off to a waiting police car in handcuffs. That confirmed my suspicions that he was insane, and I put him entirely out of my head. I never saw him again, and never felt the need nor the urge to try to find him, as my life was on an upward curve, and showed no signs of slowing down. It didn’t, and I am now a very successful chemist in a private firm supplying contraceptives to pharmacies all across Britain...



* * *



7th June 2049
Now I come to the point of my abstract narrative. It’s now been 83 years since I met the strange old man on the 19:55 to Glasgow Central, and I’m beginning to have second thoughts about his views. Those distinguished American monks cum geneticists have just made the announcement which will go down in human history as the one which rocked the world, and changed forever the way we as a race looked at religions everywhere. Dr. Henry Assad, you and your Y chromosomes, maybe you were right after all...

-END-

[Wizard]

Zarni, I figured this would be the best place to find you, as you can't be PM'd and the "new" sign doesn't show up for you.

You can't post unless you're a member---it's an antispam precaution. Sorry...apparently you like being a guest, but at least now you know why you can't post as a guest.

[K Man]

Actually, Zarni is a member Wiz. I imagine it was a) easier to post as a guest or b) he forgot his password.


Either way, it's all good. I don't fear Zarni, he's a fellow writer. He posted these stories before the lockdown as well.

As for the stories Zarni, I like them, as I always do. I'll put up a better critique.

I agree that we should breath life into the round robin thing.

[Wizard]

Oh, my post wasn't a rebuke or anything, I just wasn't sure that the R, C, I, & F post would get to him.

[Zarni]

when did this new little law come into force?
oh well, i can still post. do you write much wizard?

how about we ask the monk chappy to write in the round robin, it seems like just his sort of thing.

i await your critique in eager anticipation, as always k-man.

[K Man]

i await your critique in eager anticipation, as always k-man.

Not really sure it's worth waiting for...

Anyways, I like this idea and on some levels, I'm sure so do feminists. The inference of the soul being feminine chromosone related...

The idea of a YY child being soulless is cool. And with the abduction, who knows where that could go. Military training of super soul-less soldiers? A random occurence of a peaceful alien abduction that leads them to believe our race is soul-less and thusly deserving of genocide? Quite open-ended.

Also, have you given any thought to a follow up to this with an XXY? I heard that was a possiblity of chromosonal matches and it would interesting to see what you thought of that.

Very well done as always Zarni..

[Zarni]

why thankyou.
xxy? never thought of that, or yyx. or how about x,y,z... what could happen there, i ask you? i think i'll ask the good people of the board if they have any ideas on this one...

although i have no more complete stories that will fit on this board (the rest are all far too long), i do have the beginning of a story which has been floating around for a while, and i haven't had enough inspiration to carry it on. maybe i'll post it up, see if anyone can give me a few ideas.

[Zarni]

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the as-yet-unfinished story...

Individuality.

He wiped his sweaty hands on the green lab apron, and again looked down at the control console through sleep-clogged eyes. Popping another fatigue-prevention pill between parched lips, he swallowed with the aid of a swig of water taken from a glass held in shaky fingers. The effect of the FP pills was beginning wear off as his brain built up the natural immunity always induced by such a prolonged overdose. Soon he would have to get some proper sleep.

For Professor James Driteson, these next few weeks would be almost the climax of his career. For the other fifty-three members of staff at Psyche Solutions Inc, it was the culmination of a project which had spanned over twenty-four years, and cost $3.5 billion of private funding from the Japanese-based Yama Syndicate. As senior director of the ‘Influence Project’, he was the only member of the original team of project coordinators left in the company. This meant that all the responsibilities of putting across and selling the end result to the Yama representatives arriving on Thursday fell upon his already weighted-down and hunched-over shoulders.

This section of the experiment apparatus took up half of the football pitch-sized room of which the main hall of the Psyche Solutions complex was composed. The research complex, which took up thirty-seven acres of former Italian farmland, had been specially built by the Japanese for the purpose of housing this long-term project. The whole team owed a lot to the Italians as well as the Japanese, not least for the vast tracks of open field land which the Italian government had donated to the cause, although admittedly not before a lot of haggling over protocol and red tape had been done by both nations. The politics of the situation mattered little to James Driteson; his father had been a first class bureaucrat, and he had sworn never to go that way. Unfortunately, as effective project administrator, he was required to deal with most of the paperwork concerning the experiment. In his mind, this took up far too much valuable project time, and should be left to the accountants wherever possible. They seemed to enjoy that sort of thing. At least, they enjoyed forcing it on other people. All he really cared about was the project, which was why he had stayed up through three days and two nights without any sleep monitoring the progress of the preliminary tests from this very room.



The tank in front of him was four metres tall by two and a half metres in diameter, and filled with a murky green substance which existed somewhere between and liquid and a gaseous state. That substance contained all the nutrients a human body may need, and the machines around it resembled hospital life-support machines; indeed, life-support was their primary function. The computer mainframe was to his immediate left, and the interface console at which he was attempting to work had just started beeping. A red light flashed on the panel which monitored the primary oxygen supply line to the tank’s single occupant.

“Damn,” he read the console’s digital display and thumbed the intercom. "Biotech team to main lab, and hurry, subject 031 is undergoing a biochemical shift in his hypothalamus.”

The hypothalamus, that small area of the brain responsible for controlling temperature regulation within the body, the releasing of certain hormones including growth hormones into the blood stream, and the regulation of the water level in the blood stream, could also influence the parts of the brain concerned with behaviour and emotion. Today it had been fed a range of diverse stimuli which all corresponded to real life events and situations. The aim was to assure that all the subject’s nervous systems and vital involuntary functions would perform as expected in the real world. The hypothalamus needed to be able to integrate physical and emotional signals from throughout the body and to initiate the appropriate bodily responses for those signals.

Driteson toggled off the com, irritation displayed clearly in the creases of his face. It looked like Adam was having teething problems.



The problem had resolved itself before the technicians had arrived. Now, as James Driteson lay in his bed in the Director’s Suite on the top floor of the living facility on the grounds of the complex, he started thinking about the meeting which would take place in two days time. Tomorrow would be spent getting together facts and figures, and completing admin forms in preparation for it. As a confident orator, he would have no problems explaining the project in a positive manner; the chaotic factor would be Adam’s performance and reactions, which, while measured and controlled to a point, could turn out to be completely different to those which had been predicted by the psychoanalysts; nothing like this had ever been attempted before, and so this was new territory for all involved. Therein lay the entire objective of the experiment: to discover and catalogue his responses.

The finale was fast approaching, and Adam’s reintegration session had begun earlier this afternoon. Although his nerve centres had responded badly to the primary stimuli which had been put to them, the adaptation to the outside influences had come faster than was previously expected. His cerebellum had been provided with scenarios which incorporated, at some point or other, all the senses and every muscle. Adam’s brain was slowly coming to grips with the idea of a world which extended beyond the confines of his own mind. This was a very promising sign, and everything should start going according to plan now. Maybe at last he could seriously consider getting some real sleep.



The dreams came thick and fast, his sub-conscious painting surreal images on the canvas of his mind. Flashbacks were amongst the jumbled mass of ideas which interlocked like the pieces from a psychologist’s jigsaw puzzle; here were the other four ‘founding fathers’ of the ‘Influence Project’, now all either deceased or retired, there was Adam in his various stages of equivalent development: foetus, newborn, toddler, teenager, adolescent, culminating in his current stage of young adulthood. The preliminary experiments alone had taken nearly three years, and now, approaching his twenty first birthday, Adam was about to be truly born. Then mankind would know exactly what dear old Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, had originally expected of her children.

All this congealed in James Driteson’s head as he lay asleep, and now, as he floated in a void simultaneously full of and devoid of both colour and light, he saw the figure of a human male, curled into the protective foetal position, saw it spinning gently, watched it shrink back to an egg and then grow normally again. Forever spinning, gyrating, rotating...



The weather was reminiscent more of a lazy Sunday afternoon in August than a busy Wednesday morning in April, but then, thought Driteson as he walked through the extensive and mostly flower-filled grounds of the complex, I’m a long way from the Yorkshire dales. The walk from the personnel area of the compound to his designated building took five minutes at a stiff walking pace, but on the way one was rewarded with all the sights, sounds and smells of an English garden in full bloom during summer time; the Japanese it seemed had spared no expense when attempting to make these silly backwards English scientists feel more at ease and at home in their surroundings. The Yama Syndicate wanted, no, could afford no cock-ups.

Dr. Driteson walked into his office, absently greeted his secretary, received a similar acknowledgement in reply, and entered his ‘inner sanctum’.

There the paperwork awaited him in piles, and he stood in the doorway for a moment, taking it all in, readjusting to the idea of a whole morning wasted putting a pen to a dotted line again and again. He sighed, and walked across to the desk to begin his sentence; the sooner he completed his tasks, the sooner he would be granted parole.

The documents requiring his attention were numerous and long, many reminding him more of marking theses than of signing the skeletal documentation of Yama’s preliminary reports. As he worked, he hummed a tune; his work ethic had always been that of whistling whilst one worked, not so much out of fondness for the old cliché, but more out of the feeling that, if he didn’t incorporate as much of himself into each task he did, he would forget how to use it. Thus, as he sat, he tapped his feet rhythmically, and nodded his head slightly to strained strains of the finale of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.

- To Be Continued...? -

[K Man]

First off, I was watching TV this afternoon and noticed a trailer for the movie 'Godsend'. Here's the synopsis:

Following the death of their eight year old son on his birthday, Jessie (Romijn-Stamos) and Paul (Kinnear) are befriended by a doctor on the forefront of genetic research (DeNiro) at the height of their mourning. He leads the couple in a desperate attempt to reverse the rules of nature and clone their son. The experiment is successful and under Richard's watchful eye, Adam grows into a healthy and happy young boy, until his 8th birthday. As time goes by, the Duncan's gradually start to see small, subtle differences between the new Adam and the Adam they lost. At the time of the new Adam's eighth birthday, the changes in character are more pronounced. Adam grows distant and fearful as a palpable sense of menace settles within the young boy. This Adam begins to suffer from night terrors and frightening flashbacks as a sinister personality begins to emerge. Paul and Jessie cannot escape the fact that this Adam is different. Terror settles on the couple as they try to come to terms with just what they have done, or what has been done to them.

Basically this could be a twist on your chromosone story gone wrong Zarni. Or even for this story. Maybe this 'Adam' was in a terrible accident and was dead for over three days and this is sciences' first attempt to bring the dead back to living...i.e. - creating a soul. Or perhaps, like the Godsend movie, 'Adam' is a clone of someone that died...or even better, someone unknowing and living.

Just a few thoughts.

Aside from that, maybe 'Adam' is actually an alien from the Roswell crash that has been dead or in stasis for a long time, unable to breathe Earth's particular brand of atomsphere. The scientists manage to change his cellular structure, not all that different from our own, and make him breathe on Earth. He of course shares the secrets with his kind and they come to enslave...

Man...lot of ideas about something named 'Adam' in a tank...

Hope that helps.

[Zarni]

hmm, some interesting ideas there k-man. however, i'm certainly not too keen on roswell, i have to say. too cliche, too overdone.

however, the idea that i have had for quite some time is a little different; the idea was that the scientists involved in this project had raised a human child in this isolation tank all its life, and now, at about 21 years of age or something, they are bringing him out and seeing how he responds. he has no preconceptions of the world, and has not been influenced by any external stimuli. i want to write about what kind of a person he is: ultimate good? ultimate evil? true human potential, telepathy maybe?
problem is, i can't decide what i think he would be, how he would react to his surroundings, what he would think...