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http://www.public.iastate.edu/~apollo42
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"Android Roger and the Floopy Smugglatron"
by andrew olson
...and the regretful fog-knitting continued for hours. robots everywhere swarmed everywhere and attempted to half-heartedly overwhelm me, but i resisted like a quality resistor reliably resists and fended like mad for hours, and quite possibly on the verge of several days, until my circuits were drained and thoroughly maladjusted. not that i really cared much about my dumb circuits anyhow. so this floopy robot blumbled over to where i lay in a thickening puddle of banana creme yogurt and shrilly whistled the state song of Arkansas. i covered my precision-crafted ears with some nearby muffs until the buzzing stopped. no, there are no bees in the forest of pork. like i was going to state, the state song of Arkansas is called "Arkansas." did you know that?
but i couldn't get these muffs off my ears. they were stuck. plastered obnoxiously by some frequent ragged buzzingkindness that i didn't even want to be coerced into listening to. taking some hammer into this grasping hand of mine, i chipped away at the sound obstructions that were the earmuffs as a lone robot sulked in the corner, solitary confinement being its consolation prize and such a mockery of modern hydraulics that dangled heavily from its blinking lightbulb, which represented its mouth and the weary sigh that would have emerged from it had it been an actual mouth, and not just a blinking lightbulb masquerading as one. when i finally succeeded in removing the stubbornly sophisticated earmuffs, i was not happy, because the elephantine mattress proceeded to be suddenly and shockingly refracted. i looked the mattress-shaped elephant in the eyes and demanded a full and prompt refund, and an occasional comfortable nap.
about this time the knife stuck into my abdomen continued to be a knife stuck into my abdomen. also, my bleeding abdomen continued to demand that i remove the offensive knife that was currently intruding, trespassing, and basically being generally rude. luckily, my radioactive sonic tooth was not easily deterred. i ejected from the hovercopter because, indeed, it was going to politely crash into a strategically located pile of horse dung. and as i floated gently down to what was formerly called "earth," it occurred to me that i was not wearing a safety harness, and thus was destined to die a horribly shallow death from which i would surely not recover.
that was a longer time ago than i had previously reckoned. now i am no longer a pilot in the Galactic Air and Inhalation Squadron, an Elite Source of power and once in a while some raw Nuclear Intimidation, which is never really that nice of a war tactic, in case you were wondering.
but you probably weren't.
and you also probably weren't watching from a secure location as i courageously fought off a herd of semi-wild rodents with nothing more than a can of spray paint and a large portion of some mental institution's brick wall, but i was, and i can tell you all about it. it was a sunny day in mid-month, and the thunderous billowing rainclouds had been efficiently chased away by brilliant rays of incandescent radiation. if it had been a rainy, haily day, which it wasn't, i wouldn't have been able to perform my act in a puddle-free environment. this condition was essential to my completion of the terms of the contract that i would have signed had i not been struck by lightning at precisely the worst possible moment.
as my head was undergoing the quick and painless process of being electrocuted, it insisted that i immediately do something to relieve the intense absense of pain. so i wobbled over to the nearest murky pond and dove in. unfortunately, the lightning remained fixed on my beseiged cranium, jolting it into a certain rare type of electric ecstasy never before experienced by a creature weighing more than three pounds. while fish floated to the surface all around me, blackened and charred and in some instances still smoking, i couldn't see a thing, temporarily blinded due to the total obliteration of my optic nerves and the pinkish grey brain that they used to be attached to, but somehow i still knew that i was being increasingly surrounded by dead fish. perhaps there was some kind of scent, or fragrance, that alerted me of my current situation. then i realized that i hadn't showered in twelve days, and so possibly it wasn't the dead fish themselves that tipped me off to their existence.
after crawling out of the water and collapsing ashore, i spewed an unquestionably large volume of water from deep within the cavernous recesses of my lunglobes, and then collapsed again, this time into an unquestionably large puddle. finally i was able to stumble over to a nearby palm tree and plopped over underneath it, basking in its wondrously glorious shadiness, while i calmly waited for something to happen.
nothing happened.
ten seconds later, nothing continued to happen. after a few hours, nothing finally got tired of happening and decided to stop. the consequences of nothing's decision proved to be wholly disastrous. i was immediately struck in the head by a flying flingy. for those of you who may not fully comprehend what exactly a "flying flingy" actually is, i shall explain. a "flying flingy" is something so entirely ferocious that to be struck in the head by it under normal circumstances is usually not all that fantastic of a birthday present. in fact, it is usually a very, very bad thing.
fortunately, it was not my birthday, and even if it had been, which it wasn't, i don't think that the circumstances were anywhere remotely close to anything that could possibly be described as normal. so i wasn't seriously injured. ok. however, a giant herd of terminally rabid polar bears was heading directly at me at a velocity previously unheard of for a giant herd of, well, polar bears in general, much less ones which a qualified veterinarian surely would have diagnosed as being "terminally rabid." perhaps an ordinary person might have described them as being "terribly nutty" or maybe even "barking mad," but as far as i was concerned at the time, i frankly didn't care about eloquent descriptions. i just wanted to get out of the path of the oncoming stampede.
by the way, sometime between my crawling out of the murky fluid and my certifiably non-lethal head wound, i had suddenly regained sight in my left VisionViewer. i'm not sure if my right one is permanently fried, but i suspect that it most certainly should be. which is why i tripped over a wandering penguin and banged my head terribly hard upon the icy sand. as i looked up, the palm tree could be seen rotating blurrily above me. my head was experiencing pain and disorientation more severe than that of a toothbrush when it is forced to endure the wrath of the mighty garbage disposal.
finally the tree stopped its spinning, and the blurriness resolved itself into a crisp and wrinkle-resistant image. then i was kicked in the head by a swiftly running polar bear. then i was kicked in the head by another swiftly running polar bear. if i remember correctly, this hurt a lot. i hurriedly discovered myself to be knocked unconscious and quickly climbed up the palm tree to escape further damage to my handsomely delicate skull.
it was lovely up in the tree. i imagined myself among a thriving ecosystem of small furry animals, which made me so happy that i completely forgot about my lack of toasted blueberry pancakes. the plaid socks that i was wearing reeked humidly of a faintly peculiar stench, which closely resembled that of, if i remember correctly, a sack of rancid green oranges.
unfortunately, the rancid green oranges did not remain rancid for long, before they were extinguished by fire, or, actually, by the absence of fire, i think. which is not to imply that fire or the absence thereof is in fact actually capable of extinguishing anything, much less an entire sack of rancid green oranges.
that is all i can remember for now about what appeared to be the most abominable fruit i had ever thrown off the top of a ten story building into a raging sidewalk inferno.
but who really cares about stupid fruit anyway. i don't. do you? i don't.
so there i was, imagining that i was up in this tree, whittling myself a new pair of legs, when i happened to discover that i wasn't up in a tree at all. in fact, i was hiding underneath a rusty blue tarp, dodging polar bears like mad. this was when what was left of the rational portion my mind stopped functioning, and i panicked. severely. i don't know about you, but if you've ever been hiding under a tarp when the irrational portion of your mind takes over, you will agree that is a sad, sad thing.
however, that day i was luckily fortunate. for, soon i was to learn, the polar bears were actually my friends. we talked about current events for a while, then had a beautiful picnic under the stars. eating meat, we laughed and gurgled and chipped away at the stump with our pocketknives. This was the stump of the tree that i had imagined that i had climbed. we chipped diligently away at it, until all that was left was its remains, i think.
can i think? i wonder that often, sometimes. frequently, though, that thought does not enter my brain until it is far too late to revisit the distant past. my robotic thoughts are usually jumbled, jumpled, and jungled with radioactive interference. this i do not understand, why my thoughts get interfered with. why will the radioactivity not cease to bother me?
i am a robot. this i am sure of. ack! the toaster is alive! excuse me. i'm sorry. sometimes i just can't restrain myself, from saying things that could easily embarrass me were i not a clanky hunk of metal and steel. these wires that protrude from my ears, they aren't actually wires; they are my sensitive Sound-Detectors, that can detect the noises of, yes, even crickets, hopefully.
hopefully this will make sense. i'm sure that it doesn't. makes me wonder: can i think? but really what i am asking is: where has the plot gone? why am i stuck here, chained to this highly electric fence, just rambling about nothing, and nothing about rambling is very impressive. zap. i'm dead. no, i'm not - it was just a baby eel, perhaps.
i wrote that last paragraph over three years ago, as i was chained to an electro-volt fence. i was not happy there. i tried powerfully to escape from my heart-stoppingly frightening predicament, but to no avail. the chain was exponentially stronger than i. a little woodchuck set me free. i remember that day more vividly than most. it was a brutally sunny day, the intense waves of fiery heat cascading down fiercely upon my sombrero.
when my sombrero ignited into a giant ball of flame, a little woodchuck saw that i was chained to a shock-o-matic fence with a flaming sombrero on my head, and decided that he should gnaw through the chain, as to release me from terminal bondage and allow me to exist for many more trillions of microseconds.
so there i was, stumbling away from the fried corpse of the friendly woodchuck. i noticed that i was out in the middle of frankly nowhere. it was, kind of like, dare i say, tundra? i'm not absolutely sure what tundra is, but i think it's pretty close to wigwam-style octupus harpoons.
now it was, as i recall, a blisteringly feverish day, and i wasn't sweating bucketfuls of profuse perspiration out through my overworked pores. that's because i couldn't sweat. i still can't sweat. i wish i could sweat. then there was an earthquake. oh, and a tornado too. i'm very glad that there was not a light drizzling rain also, or i surely would have been killed. you see, i am allergic to water, because i am simply a hunk of aluminum and fiberglass, and my circuits are fragile.
what is the meaning of life? that is what i was thinking as i struggled to survive amidst the quaking ground and the twirling gusts of wind, if i am truly able to think. i'm not sure if i can ever know for sure, whether or not my thought patterns are algorithmically structured or realistically random.
i heroically leaped over a gaping crack in the parched ground and was flung back into the air by the blizzard-like spiral of spiraling air. i supposed that this was when i discovered the true usefulness of my industrial-strength wings. flapping them twice, i escaped from the grasp of the tornadic activity and soared off southwestwardly. i was still spinning, dizzy, and disoriented, but alive.
yes, and alive is generally not a bad thing to be, is what i was thinking as i flew gracefully through the beautiful blue sky, until i smashed headfirst into a huge cliff and was instantly killed.
to be continued...
[this story rewrites itself twelve times a day. come back frequently for new episodes from the random story generator.]
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