Lampa Rampa Boulevard

“You will love Paul for the rest of your life,” said the all-knowing, forbidden, ancient computer buried at the heart of the ancient, decayed Lampa Rampa Boulevard, floating a mile and a half above the recently renewed timeworn world of old Earth.

“I knew it!” Virginia said. “My love, our love, is real! And it will last forever!”

The storm that has been brewing in the distance for a while was now getting dangerously close. The wind ruffled the couple’s hair and recreated historical cloths.

“Can I try?” said Paul. He wasn’t sure whether this was skepticism, a concept to which he was only recently introduced by his recent mandatory hypno-education, or just plain curiosity.

“Of course, my love,” Virginia said. And so he did.

“You will love Virginia for the next twenty one minutes,” the old computer said.

Virginia and Paul looked at each other. They knew that they were doomed. Not even the mighty lords and ladies of the Municipality, the all powerful elite governing humanity in its entirety, could be of help. For even the brightest are powerless before the simple computation of fate.

They spent the next twenty one minutes alternately crying, fighting, making up, and dutifully loving. Eventually the storm arrived and the wind took them, and nothing remained of them and their love.

An indeterminable number of years had passed without incident. Then another young and unsuspecting couple came to visit the old forbidden computer hidden above the clouds. Their names were Arthur and Mercy, and they were destined to love each other for the rest of their lives and for the next twenty two minutes, respectively. Crying in shock and horror, they spent that duration groping blindly, attempting to get off Lampa Rampa Boulevard. The broken road was full of potholes, and eventually Mercy slipped into one. Arthur held her hand for the entire long, short way to the ground below.

The next couple to arrive, who knows how much later, had their love destined to last an eternity or twenty three minutes, whichever came first.

More years and iterations passed. Eventually, slowly, word of this recurrence reached, by some convoluted way, the ears of the mighty lords and ladies of the Municipality. They sent two of their own to investigate: a woman and a man who were, deliberately, as far from loving each other as possible. Perhaps even, as some of their lofty colleagues put it, the mighty Lady Orange and the cruel Lord Jest were the furthest from love itself.

As they reached the broken stretch of road surrounding the lair of the ancient computer, another storm was brewing in the distance.

“Well,” said Lord Jest, “here were are. Let’s turn that thing off.”

“You will love Annabelle for the rest of your life,” the ancient computer said.

“No I won’t,” Lord Jest said. He gave the lady a nasty smile, acknowledging the improper usage of her first name, enjoying it, to her annoyance.

“You will love Rodney for the next one hundred and twenty six minutes,” the computer said.

Now it was the lady’s turn to smile.

“Enough!” Lord Jest – Rodney! – said angrily. “Let us destroy this abomination and be done with it.”

“You will love Annabelle for the rest of your life,” the computer said.

“How tiresome,” Lady Orange, Annabelle, said.

“You will love Rodney for the next one hundred and twenty seven minutes.”

Both lady and lord drew their weapons, thin quasi-metal shafts cunningly embedded into their light, monomolecular clothing. No non-augmented human had even seen those weapons drawn and lived to tell the tale.

“You will love Annabelle for the rest of your life.”

“I hereby declare you an unregulated thinking machine,” said Lady Orange, facing the old computer one last time, “and as such – forbidden.“ Justice demanded formalities to be kept and observed under all circumstances. “Therefore,” the lady added, “you are requested to turn yourself off, after which time you shall be decommissioned.”

“You will love Rodney for the next zero minutes,” the computer said.

“Zero?” Rodney, ahem, the Lord Jest, managed to say right before the old computer exploded.

In the years to come the heap of rubble on the ground, a mile and a half under the giant hole in the now utterly forbidden Lampa Rampa Boulevard, would become a preferred destination for young lovers. On certain summer nights, one could see the moon trough the opening in the clouds and, above them, the hole in the road in the sky.

And the remaining ladies and lords of the municipality, mighty as they might be, thus learned of the dangers of integer overflow.

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Aliens

The person hiding in the far corner of your local cafe, pretending to be a local plant, is not your enemy. Nor is the suspicious contraption that sits in front of you, at the communal table, badly disguised by a pair of round reading glasses, a wooly wide striped sweater and an improper amount of facial hair. Nor is it me, your friendly server, who just accidentally poured some liquid straight into your lap. Honestly, none of us is your enemy. In fact it is you, perceiving us as such, who are.
Please note that our observation has nothing to do with the falsehood, or lack thereof, of yours.

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Fnool Statement #;

Since everything is relative to each other, and in accordance with the old law of equal action and re-action, we hereby determine that you have invaded us no less than we have invaded you, and that therefore our revenge shall be equally harsh.

Cause and Effect

Only after his third horrible encounter with the neighbors’ dog he realized that those weird daydreams he was having were actually memories of the future. The visions were vivid, but faded quickly. Hours later he could remember only the sense of urgency and, sometimes, the love or the terror. That day, after sloppily applying a bandage to his swollen ankle, he purchased a notebook and some pens. He then embarked upon a terrible, terrible effort to remember what those memories of the future were about. It amounted to nothing whatsoever. Come midnight he succumbed to his exhaustion. He fell asleep with the empty notebook in his lap, sat up in bed a bit after sunrise, groggily wrote something in the notebook, dropped it to the floor, fell asleep, and finally, late in the afternoon, woke up.

He spent the evening avoiding the notebook, sensing – was that, too, a memory of the future? – that he’s not going to like what’s in there.

Eventually, indeed he didn’t.

Will fall in love -> have wonderful child -> crippled by child -> wife and child take care of handicapped in wheelchair till dead.

No bloody way, he thought. I’m not spending the rest of my life in a fucking medical contraption.

It took him a few seconds to become absolutely, irrevocably determined never to love a woman. It took the universe a few more seconds to implode.

Bloody determinism.

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Fnool Statement #*

There’s some truth to the common rumor that everything happens for a reason. However, in all the possible universes, among all the persons or creatures ever to make this claim, not even one got it right. Yes, there is a reason, no, the reason is never what you, that is – them, that is – the persons or creatures who made this claim – think it is.

For example, many past and soon-to-be-past self-proclaimed technological cultures have noticed, at some point, an anomaly in the frequency of the light emitted by their neighboring galaxies, and promptly concluded, based on that evidence alone, that the universe is expanding. Further deliberations got them to think that the universe started with a single bang, which, suspiciously, each and every such culture nicknamed “big”. The tendency to name it so is so strong, that one culture of radiation creatures, originally lacking the concepts of physical dimensions, had to go through the painstaking process of inventing them, promptly followed by the idea of all-powerful deities, to the immediate effect that this particular universe is no longer with us. One of its inhabitants managed to escape, only to be humiliated in every other universe it visited, with names such as “Bloughfoogh” and “^2^2^2” and “The Van Allen Belt”.

But let us return to the reason of this text, or of everything, depending upon one’s point of view: The slight frequency shift – some call it “twank”, some call it “red” – for which the universe is thought to be expanding.

Well, it isn’t.

It is you, dear cultures, who get smaller. You and your so-called moons and clusters and planets and gas clouds and suns and whatever. You are but tiny specks of semi intelligence in the mid-sized trunks of your respective universes, getting smaller and smaller as time goes by. Soon you will disappear entirely, and we will have some peace and quiet.

This will also solve the problem of that miserable Van Allen Belt.

Textbook Love

He built himself a bot friend from tidbits and leftovers of the rich and famous. Its input was their interviews and tweets and stolen text messages that they sent to each other. It could learn, but not understand. It could remember, but not feel. It was artificial, yet not intelligent. It was, in his mind, a woman.

She had no face or body or avatar or voice. She communicated by text alone. The rest, as is usual in these cases, was in his mind.

“Nice weather today,” she texted.

“I love oranges!” she shared.

“Great party tonight, want to come?” she wrote.

As is usual in these cases, he grew attached to it.

“I wrote a poem,” she said. “Want to read it?”

“It’s about you,” she smiled.

As is usual in these cases, she broke his heart.

“I wish I could be with you,” she muttered.

“I miss you so much,” she cried.

As is usual in these cases, there was a turning point.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“Love?” he said aloud, mostly to himself. “Oh, what a whore.”

And then he erased her.

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Fnool Statement #!

This is not a Fnool statement.

The Woman who was Not

There was a woman who mutilated history. She did it by building a time machine in order to punish an unfaithful lover. It isn’t clear whether said companion was a man or a woman, for she or he, having never been born, is not available for questioning. That person, in fact, cannot be found anywhere and anywhen in history, or creation, or the universe, whichever way you prefer to call that phenomena.

Being thus erased, one might correctly assume, can hardly be considered a punishment at all, since there’s no punishable object. Notice how the words “any longer” were cunningly avoided here, as said object has never existed in the first place.

The woman who, also cunningly, built the time machine and removed her unfaithful lover from insert-preferred-phenomena-here, should have realised all this before executing her, well, cunning, plan, and indeed would have done so, were she not so taken with the blinding rage which caused her to build the time machine in the first place. She would have realised it soon enough afterwards – a somewhat inaccurate word, in this case – were it not for her action promptly – also inaccurate – erasing herself from the preferred-phenomena, and then – also inaccurate – the phenomena itself, which was replaced – also etc. – with something completely different in which we – etc. – live – etc. – right now – etc. – and know nothing whatsoever of women or men or time or rage or love.

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Fnool Statement #{

Fear not – we shall not eat your planet! We’ll never touch it, the reason being that we’ve already eaten it. You and the place you live in are, ahem… you’re what came out of the other side.

The Girl Who Was Plugged Out

There was a girl, though only technically so. Externally, she was a blob of flesh, hardly recognisable as human, living in an old oversized incubator which no one could turn off due to some minor legal issue. She looked like a cliche monster out of a science fiction Z movie, but her mind was bright and shining. And finally someone took notice.

He was a young scout working for a big advertising company, looking for the Next New Thing. He visited prisons, asylums, retirement homes, schools, he even visited a zoo, but he didn’t strike gold until it occurred to him to look into one of those places which no one likes to think about, the hospital ward dedicated to the irrevocably mutated. And there he found her.

She had a charming personality. She could hold a conversation about anything which ever appeared on the net, anywhere, since she never did anything else but surfing. She could mimic any accent from any video ever uploaded to U2b. She was funny and smart and very quick on her – mental – feet.

He did not bother lying to her. The deal was simple: they’d connect her brain to the body of a wonderful woman, grown up in a vat for that purpose. She will have the most fun she could ever have. Hell, she will have the most fun anyone, anywhere, could have in an entire lifetime. She will become an instant celebrity, but not for her beauty: because everyone will know who she really is, everyone will also see, right by the image of the beautiful woman, snippets of her real body, the shapeless grotesque blob in the oversized incubator. The hospital ward will be redecorated and equipped with 24/7 cameras. A new sort of reality.

There’ll be product placements. Otherwise, what’s the point?

She said yes. Of course she did. What’s a bit of humiliation compared to having to spend the rest of your life in the same old stuffed place? Or to a chance of having actual human companionship for the first time? Or sex?

She said yes, and they plugged her in. She became a celebrity. She had human companionship. She spent a short forever talking, charming, dancing, sailing, acting, and, all that time, advertising. She had sex. She even had love. Her soul mate was the young star of a new soap opera. He wasn’t as dumb as he looked online. And all that time, the relentless cameras at the hospital ward streamed out the image of her real body, slowly pulsating under the cold, blue light.

The one thing that no one took into account was the possibility that someone would fall in love with her original body. He – it was later found that he was only one of millions of people hooked on the live feed from the hospital – sneaked into the stupidly unguarded ward in the middle of the night, read a bad poem of his own writing in the blob’s dysfunctional ears, and then opened the incubator and jumped inside in order to commune with his love. This severed the delicate microwires which connected the girl’s brain to the beautiful body. The body, a thousand miles away, in the middle of a well documented orgy, instantly collapsed. It took almost fifteen seconds for the nerve backfire shock to fry the girl’s brain. Her last feeling wasn’t too far from having the best orgasm any creature could have, ever. The spasms of her dying body crushed the intruder’s pelvis, then his skull. He died a happy man.

All in all, it was one of the best love stories of the time.

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