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in the 84 page perfect-bound issue...
cc&d magazine (v211)
(the August 2010 Issue)

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Message from the Monkey House

Edward Dobiecki

    A merry tune, piped directly into my enchephalic brain-stem, wakes me up from a pretty dream of a peaceful world, and gets me back into the dog-eat-quiznor realm of the intergalactic zoo. It’s time to please the visitors; the kiddies and mommies and egg-hatchers of a thousand worlds come through the gates and thread their way through the various cages and enclosures to come look at the newest oddities and curiosities.
    Here I stand, the advanced monkey: Man. A little alien kid points at me and says something in his gobbledy-gook speech. I think it’s a Dolzian. He sounds like a thousand backwards records, but I’m sure it’s something like “Dance, monkey, Dance!” He touches a button on his wrist band, my involuntary nervous system takes over my muscle control, and I dance. Whenever this happens, I always think back to the days when I visited the zoo back on earth. I went for the quiet and contemplation, and to commune with the animals. Now, I always wish I could grab the kids who threw peanuts at the animals and throw them in with the alligators.
    I was frozen in 1998, at what would be the height of the first cryogenics craze. I was a very, very rich man, and I figured I would be unfrozen just as soon as they found a cure for my diseased heart. Which is what happened. Unfortunately, I was unfrozen not by a kind medical staff a few decades later, but instead by privateers, the space pirates that loot the thousand empty Nest worlds, healed by their advanced technology, and brought here.
    A Hmn approaches my cage, his long ropy tentacle wrapped around his mate, its long tendrils gently cupping her vestigial nourishment organ. She, in turn, has her tentacular arms around him. They both have translucent skin. No children, which is a blessing. The Hmn children are the worst.
    I reawakened in a confusing world that I couldn’t imagine, let alone comprehend. In the 90’s, the only future I could imagine was one of unbridled internet-fueled growth. My own website had made me a millionaire almost overnight when I sold it to prospectors. No one has filled me in on the details of old Earth’s economy, so I can only assume that the .com revolution continued, fueling ever greater economic growth without environmental responsibility, until the earth became the hollow Nest world it is now. I, myself, rolled the money I made immediately into a cryogenics business, becoming both a major shareholder and one of the first customers.
    The Dolzian has tired of me and moved its attentions to one of the women, seeming to take pleasure in watching her awkwardly gyrate. His control band pipes directly into our system; we can’t control ourselves, and we dance however he wants us to. She dances with her hands full of food, eventually dropping it all across the ground. But she keeps dancing, as the Dolzian twists the knobs. His parental unit lets him do this for awhile, a long while, before finally pulling him away. There’s oh-so-very-many other educational exhibits here, and they don’t want to spend all day on just one.
    I learned from the aliens who woke me up, communicating via scratchy and screechy translation modules, that my freezing had been ‘ungood’, but they’d been able, with their technology, to ‘repairerize’ my body. I still have trouble thinking sometimes, my repaired neurons misfiring, and I know that the majority of my organs are artificial. Also, I have trouble peeing with what they gave me. The zookeepers make me cover its metallic sheen with a loincloth, so as not to ruin the image of animals ‘in the wild’ that they cultivate. That and the necktie I’m forced to wear make up the only garments I’m allowed. At least I’m better off than the women here; in an appeal to the prurient interests of their clientèle, our masters refuse to let them wear any clothes at all. They ‘nurse’ robotic fetuses, with artificial birth fluid seeping from their gills, while typing meaningless ‘reports’ full of gibberish. I guess it’s to show how women both worked outside the home and raised children. I’m twice as happy that I’m not a woman than I was when I just made more money and got more promotions.
    The Hmn and his mate have decided to sit on one of the ubiquitous benches. They sicken me, so I try not to look at them directly. Luckily, a Gorgolite class on some sort of field trip, comes to the mag rail. Now, I don’t know if that’s a fair assessment. Our owners haven’t allowed us to read, or learn anything about the universe we now live. So it might not be a class trip. For all we know, the Gorgolites age backwards, in some alien system of growing from the ground, becoming old, then young, then becoming nothing in a womb. Aliens are weird like that. But they look like a class trip, so that’s how I think of them.
    We know some things. For those occasions when our captors have to get us to fully understand some inane command, we are provided with translation modules. We could leave them on to listen to the patrons, if we wanted to. We generally leave them off, though. No matter how many years more advanced than us, or how alien a culture is, its young will still think flatulence jokes are the funniest thing ever. And zoos, even space zoos, primarily appeal to children. You can only hear the same bad jokes repeated so many times before you just want to go back to hearing ‘grizzlegarblarg batohd na dhoingi’. That we can tune out as white noise. We do turn them on sometimes, though. It’s how we know the fate of our species, from various teachers informing their field-tripping students.
    There are many others here who have been here far longer than I, and they’ve told me what they can. Apparently, cryogenics was perfected sometime after I was frozen. I was, for all intents and purposes, actually dead. A kind of a frozen drumstick, if you will. The others, they were actually just in stasis. Which means that they only had the parts that needed repairing in the first place replaced, the lucky jerks. Faulty hearts, broken blood vessels, sickly marrow. Our captors are lazy and cheap, so they don’t bother fixing problems organically when a prosthetic alternative is available, so we’re all a little cyborgy.
    Behind the Gorgolites, some Dr’lth are chattering excitedly. They do everything excitedly. They’re bored excitedly. God, I hate them. I hate them and every species that refuses to put vowels in their name. I also hate the Gorgolites and their giant broods. And I hate our captors, for bothering to bring me back to life just so I can sit in a ridiculous cage.
    But I don’t have it so bad, really, and maybe shouldn’t complain. They realized, from the age of my cryotube, that I was an important man when I was alive, and set me up as a ‘boss’ of this office. I’m ‘middle management’. The women are expected to fellate me daily, and the men bring me food and dance on the conference tables. I, on the other hand, have no specific duties except to screech and howl unintelligibly three times a month. Occasionally, they want me to steal things from my ‘subordinates’ and give them to my ‘boss’, because even I have one; he’s a Jabba-like monstrosity. I think I feel the most sympathy for him; they brought him back, and force fed him like a Foie Gras duck, just because they thought our species considered obesity a sign of great status. The things I steal are usually food, and he’s expected to eat them all, in addition to the food they still use a tube to cram into his gullet. His eyes tear all the time, and I can’t tell if it’s just a consequence of his weight or not. He can’t even talk any more; his vocal cords are surrounded by so much fat that he can only gurgle sadly.
    Our captors come by again, now that the customers have slowed. The Hmns are still there, but this time section on the station is one of the slowest, and there’s no one else. The Hmns are too lost in each other’s tendrils and occulams to notice the tayzstiks that the Benzors are wielding.
    They close the metal doors, to hide us from view, and turn on the translators, though they don’t talk much. They use hand gestures primarily, as though it is beneath them to speak to us. I suppose, to them, it is. After all, we’re just dead end evolutionary throwbacks, another set of missing links they put on display along with a million other species, to be pointed and jeered at in our little prisons.
    Apparently it’s new clothes day. Once every year or so since I’ve been thawed, they’ve given us new clothes. Of course, without calendars, it’s hard to tell what the schedule is. Considering they have only a cursory understanding of ancient human fashion, these new clothes leave a great deal to be desired. I get a new tie and a loincloth, the women get to use a pair of pants tied together as a sling for their robofeti. The tiny fake infants are a burden to the women, but they don’t mind them as much as the previous system. The others tell me that before our captors settled upon robofetii, they would keep the women constantly pregnant, but apparently the logistics of constant childbirth were too expensive, and the suicide rate among mothers was getting too high.
    There’s only one thing I live in fear of, thanks to my position in middle management: retirement. Our overlords have a set of sharpened golf clubs, and upon our reaching our golden years, we’re given a huge watch on a long chain and a club of our choice. Then I’ll be put into cryofreeze again, until there’s enough retirees for a good battle royale. So when I’m looking old I’ll be frozen until I can be thrown into a pit to battle all the other old-timers to the death. I’m forty-eight now, if I ignore all that downtime I spent frozen. I can only hope I keep looking young until I’m in my sixties.
    I put on my new tie and loincloth, and everyone else puts on their new clothes. Our overlords raise the shutters again, using a few grunts and hand motions to indicate ‘get back to work,’ so we do so. I shuffle my papers; having stolen yesterday, I’m good for another day or so, so I sit back and wait for my first female employee of the day.
    Across the way, the Hmns are looking at us. The Benzors left the translator on, so we can understand their strange gurgling speech.
    “It’s hard to believe,” the female Hmn said. “Don’t you think?”
    The male Hmn took her tendrils from his mouth. “What?”
    “You know. That those monkeys managed to figure out how to use sharpened bones, burn just enough liquefied fossils and chemical toxins to destroy their planet and emerge into space, like it was some kind of chrysalis.”
    The male turned to look at us. “I guess. But we shouldn’t make any moral judgments. After all, they’re just beasts. All the Nest worlds ended up like that. Just another sign of universal similarities, I suppose. Still,” He said, trailing off. The strange lights that glowed under his translucent skin twinkled dimly.
    “What?”
    “They almost look like they’re thinking, don’t they?”
    The Hmn female laughed, an untranslated tinkle that grated on my ears.
    “Our monkey ancestors, thinking? You know that’s ridiculous!”
     “I suppose you’re right,” the male said. They both laughed at us, then got up and resumed their tentacular embrace as they strolled away. I tried a little game; I tried to kill them with my brain, attempting to access latent psychokinetic powers. Sadly, it never works. They strolled off to other parts of the zoo.



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