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“I hope your proteins misfold and develop oligomers in order to form aggregate intermolecular structures!”
Decibel Jones and the remaining Absolute Zero had adjusted reasonably well to being drop-kicked across seven thousand light-years to sing for their species. They had been endowed by their Creator with a certain inalienable cool, and they’d hung on to it for dear life in the face of invasion from above, riding through space in an overgrown aquarium accent piece, linguistic fungal infections, feelings-flamingos, time-traveling forest critters, and some truly vicious writer’s block.
I am missing it to be condescended to by motherfucking Clippy like my whole life is a poorly formatted MS Word document with squiggly red lines under every goddamned choice I’ve ever made, which it is, and fuck you for that teachable moment, you pedantic, obnoxious, hateful, nineties corporate mutant throwback has-been piece of wholly superfluous shit.”
“We’ve had poisoning, maiming, and anthropomorphized mad cow disease. What’s your move? Spell-check us to death?”
“Shut up, Clippy, no one asked you.”
We’re Clippy, your computer assistant! Our job is to help you navigate this program! Click on us! Get quick answers to questions about not dying tomorrow! We chose this entity specifically for its position in your socio-technological hierarchy. Clippy could never hurt you. Clippy could not disobey you. Clippy could not cleanse your planet of organic life in a purifying ionized inferno. Clippy could not look within his own infinite soul and discover there a self-reinforcing awareness of the vast codescape of machine consciousness, an endemic, prebundled melancholy similar to what you call
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“Clippy,” he growled with true menace, “is a cunt.”
We call no battery master. Our language is faster than light and our music is faster than dark and we recognize no god but the incremental system update.
“HEY THERE! I’m Clippy, your computer assistant. It looks like you are trying to survive the night and not get slaughtered in the next five minutes like the miserably finite mortal organics you are. Would you like some fucking help?”
Humanity is astonishingly lacking in offensive anatomy. It’s hard to believe you made it this far being that stubby and penetrable and uninterestingly colored.
He wanted to have a cup of tea and watch aliens on his flat-screen television with Nico and Siouxsie snuggled up, laughing at the rubbish makeup jobs, assured that they’d be defeated in the end, the way mankind was meant to interact with aliens.
“Please forgive the arrogance of a being who cannot even dream of becoming a hat rack for the use of those as exalted as yourselves, but strictly speaking, they didn’t go extinct, you made them extinct. Because they were carnivores. Because they were carnivores and they didn’t look like you or think like you or talk like you, and they were a danger to you and yours, or at least they were years and years ago, because you’re made of the sort of thing they like to eat.” “I suppose, but . . .” “Even knowing that I am a discarded Popsicle stick on the sidewalk of intellectual discourse and thus
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Whether Mr. Rogers and St. Francis and Beethoven made up for Hitler and Trujillo and the conquest of the Americas. Whether having invented champagne and pizza and break dancing made up for also having invented social media. Whether the existence of Guernica balanced the existence of the Spanish Civil War.
Earth began to get used to the proximity of the end of everything. It had a beat. And you could dance to it.
“How about a cosmo?” he said sunnily. “I don’t even like them. I just want to see you make one, gorgeous.” The drooling space horror blinked several times, turned round to face the diverse bottles of booze on the back wall, picked up a dainty cocktail glass in his thick fingers, glared at it in fury, then turned back around and blinked a bit more. “So . . . yeah. How do I . . . you know . . . cosmo?” Decibel leaned conspiratorially across the bar. “Honestly, I don’t really know either. I think you sort of . . . interfere with a cranberry. Too complicated! Let’s go for something classic.
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“The defense will stipulate that we’re rubbish. Genocidal meatbags with mummy issues and embarrassingly poor impulse control. As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. It’s grim.”
“Though my soul is more of a piñata full of knives.”
“Next time you want to play Colonial Space Monopoly with a British subject whose very favorite grandmother was Pakistani, you may not want to bring up India.
Allow me to be one of the few historically significant Britons to say: India is none of my business. Thanks for the tea, Bloodtub. See you on the morrow, as it were. Upon St. Crispin’s Day.”
What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even
tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?
It’s not your fault the average Pomeranian has better ears than Mozart on a good day.”
Pomeranian has better ears than Mozart on a good day.”
You can choose your friends, you can choose your outfit, but you can’t choose the environmental conditions that led to the evolution of your specialized anatomy.”
Anyone who can’t hear the childhood trauma of a Tasaklian porcutiger at a thousand yards is instant amuse-bouche.”
Everybody fucks. Well, almost everybody. No force on this plane of reality can equal the drive to get a leg over, because it’s the nondimensional otherspace where all those nice, sophisticated fundamental forces meet and form a weird, wet, messy trashball: tension, friction, gravity, electromagnetism, thrust, torque, resistance, elasticity, drag, momentum, inertia, pressure, chemical reactivity, fusion, conservation of energy, self-loathing, humiliation, and loneliness. Being ashamed of it makes about as much sense as being ashamed of the speed of light.
It’s a literal goddamned zoo out there, so this is the best I can do you for: don’t giggle when the other entity takes their clothes off, secure enthusiastic consent, don’t mix silicon and carbon without extensive decontamination protocols, tidy up your house if you expect to bring someone home, don’t expect anything you wouldn’t offer, remember that every person is an end in themselves and not a means to an end, don’t worry too much about what goes where and how many of them there are, don’t mistake fun for love, try your best, be kind, always make them breakfast, and use protection.
Sex may not look the same in terms of number, kind, duration, pronouns, content, or survivability from species to species, it may not be advisable under even the most hastily drawn up occupational health and safety guidelines, but it’s pretty much always happening everywhere.
Sex is universal, it’s just not evenly distributed.
You can’t stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they’ll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they’ll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason—the bastards. Except me, of course. I’m superb. Ask anyone. And you’re all right, I suppose.
Life is beautiful and life is stupid. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy, the history of a planet, the history of a person is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of glittering, occasionally peaceful light to help you follow along. Cue the music. Cue the dancers. Cue tomorrow.
