Atlantic Pacf.
Back from the dead
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2012
- Messages
- 400
Arianne Kapoor sighed as she saw the sun set over the distant New York skyline. In the distance, bombs went off. People were yelling all over the place, probably not out of fear, but out of believing that they can win at yelling after failing to win at anything else. They were also setting stuff on fire for no discernible reason. Police cars, their horns blazing, race along the gridded streets in a futile attempt to restore law and order.
This is the end, she thought. I'm witnessing the collapse of society a second time. It's like Iran, all over again! Except that...well, this isn't much different from Iran.
Arianne leaned back into her wheelchair. No use living when society just keeps collapsing around you, right? The continuous barking of an anonymous dog was quickly stopped by a quick succession of gunfire.
She looked on her lap. Lying on it was a small bottle of a mostly-orange liquid, with milky-white clouds of something suspended in it. She held it up and examined it closely. Thousands of years ago, an unknown herbalist in northern Korea discovered a fairly useful herbal remedy that has many actual and made-up uses. That was not the liquid Arianne was holding. What she was holding was its precursor, the infamous "juice" of a rare Korean fruit tree. Legend has it that when it was first discovered, the rulers of Korea wiped out a quarter of the Korean race through their intensive testing. Historians continue to debate whether the remedy saved more people's lives than the "juice."
Hands shaking, she unscrewed the bottle cap. "You know," Arianne said to nobody, "I hoped that the future would be better tomorrow. But no, it keeps getting worse. First, you get shot. You never walk again." She took a swallow of saliva. "Then your country collapses, so you must escape. Then you nearly get raped, but you didn't get raped, because someone else got shot. Then you get fired because of who you were with for the past month. Then you get your house burned down by Germans, so you move to your friend's house, which then gets burned by Mexicans. Then because you can never walk again, you get stuck in an unhappy marriage with some loser." She chuckled. "Okay, maybe I exaggerated that last part just a teensy bit."
She took a whiff of the bottle. The "juice" was much like cyanide, in that despite being a deadly poison, it smelled sweet. Specifically, it smelled like apricots.
"And then your country escapes a second time. You know, I hope that the Americans would get their together and do something, like, say, building a robotic exoskeleton or neural implant so I can walk again. But no, they're too conceited and stupid to even do that."
She took a look at the sky one last time. "Now nuclear war is upon is. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. With my luck, I would be one of them. At least, if it weren't for what I'm holding. Better to die than be killed, they say."
Arianne wheeled herself away from the window. "A lot of people have been announcing the end of the world. Economic collapses, environmental degradation, pandemics like the new human immunodeficiency virus, and now this. Everybody then says it depressing. I agree, but I would add this: it's only depressing because it's true."
And so she took a swig at the "juice." Almost instantly, she went into a fit of vomiting, followed by convulsions and finally cardiac arrest. She fell down in front of her wheelchair, in prone position, on the wooden floor. The bottle, still not yet completely empty, slowly rolled out of her hand.
Due to the general chaos of society and whatnot, nobody (not even her husband Sebastian) noticed her death for a week. Even after someone thought Hey Sebastian, why hasn't your wife been showing up lately? it took another day to break down the doors of the Kapoor residence. Incidentally, not everyone involved in retrieving the body knew Arianne (nor vice versa). Among those people included an athletic yet somewhat dim-witted teenager named Forrest Gump and the famous indie filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
After retrieving his wife's body, Sebastian became a vagabond, traveling in his Ford across the not-yet-post-apocalyptic wasteland. After all, his family has either died, been killed, or became preoccupied with not dying or being killed. He was fired from his job as the editor for The New York Daily News, as maintaining a newspaper company is very difficult if your headquarters has been pillaged, raped, and burned. Without a purpose in life, Sebastian became content with simply wandering the remains of America, with only the food and clothes he brought or could procure. Eventually, his supplies, be it food or gasoline, would run out, and he knew this. There was still enough "juice" in Arianne's bottle for one more person, as it turned out.
One day, while wandering through some cornfields of Kaskaskia, Sebastian came across a military installation. Nuclear missle silo, Sebastian guessed correctly. The complex was a dreary gray that stuck out from the boring brown of dead corn. It was pretty big too, so big that the buildings themselves were visually blurred by the atmosphere.
There was a person by the barbed wire fence; he seemed like the only person other than Sebastian in a hundred mile radius. The man was in a wheelchair, slightly leaning to one side. There was no car, nor any other indication of how the man might've gotten there, near him. On closer inspection, the man was impeccably dressed and was perfectly clean (unlike Sebastian or any other normal post-apocalyptic survivor). His silver hair was perfectly moussed, and his glasses were like a pair of window panes. On one arm of his wheelchair, his left hand seemed to have a firm clasp of his right.
As Sebastian drove closer to the man, he seemed to grew more familiar. He has been on TV, that's a fact Sebastian knew. But Sebastian simply couldn't pin who he was down. It was like there were a million faces in his head, faces of both the living and the dead, and had to flip through them one by one.
"I zee thet you heve stupped by fur a veezit!" the man said in a pronounced accent.* German accent, it seemed.
Sebastian, not knowing if the other guy could or would kill him, stepped out of his car. "Morning," he said, not knowing that it was afternoon.
"Morning to you too!"
"Say," Sebastian said as he closed the door, "I seem to recognize you from television. Are you..." It clicked in him. "Dr. Strangelove, the nation...um...yeah, nation's premier expert on nuclear weapons. Say, O Dr. Strangelove, what has brought you here to this particular installation?"
"We have a special event coming up," Dr. Strangelove answered. "The more important question is, perhaps, why are you here?"
"It's complicated, really. Um...I'd rather not discuss."
"Wait," Dr. Strangelove said as his right hand shot into the air, pointing at nothing. "I know what it is! Your wife, Arianne Kapoor, née Khorasani, has committed suicide from drinking the Infamous Korean juice! And you, my friend, are her husband Sebastian Kapoor, Punjabi immigrant and fired newspaper editor editor!"
"Wait...what?" Sebastian froze. "What?"
"'What?' Dr. Strangelove imitated. 'What? What is all this? What is all that?'"
"This is serious!" Sebastian said. "You can't just dig up all my private details like that? How were you able to do so anyways? Did the government keep Browder's secret police or something, even as it descended into anarchy?"
"Reasons, my friend," Dr. Strangelove said, his hand pointing to his left, to the missile silo. "Reasons, of not all of which I know of. But one thing is for sure - I know Arianne."
"Really?" Sebastian asked.
"Yes. I remember being in the very same accident that disabled Arianne. It disabled me es well - except that I can actually walk now, except that I don't feel like it - and gave me...this...stupid..." - Strangelove grabbed his anomalous hand - "hand!"
"Really?" Sebastian questioned. He raised an eyebrow. "You mean the UN Shooting of 1921? I thought you were German! Surely there weren't any German foreign exchange students involved, right?"
"Um, yes, but I used to be American." Strangelove, his hand firmly in other hand, paused. "Or maybe you're right, maybe I had always been German. You know, there's a lot about my past that I don't remember. Like for example, I used to have a first name, before I settled on 'Doktor Merkwürdigliebe'. What was it? I don't know! At least it's nothing I don't regret."
Sebastian contemplated on how a man who knows other peoples' personal information doesn't even recall his own name, let alone his own past.
"Maybe it was in a past life, and in that past life, I was Indian. If so, that would explain why I believe in past lives. Or maybe not. Maybe my indecision is what's causing people to say that I have brain damage, an accusation which I vehemently deny. Oh well; doesn't matter. The UN building is abandoned now, full of mice and holes."
"But anyways," Strangelove continued. "I'm here to witness a special event. Today, we're going to launch a nuclear weapon!"
"What?" Sebastian cried. Even as the apocalypse commenced, nuclear warfare was always a distant thing in his mind. But now, even if he wasn't on the receiving end of a nuke, he would bear witness to the awesome power of the nadir of what men can spawn.
"Do not worry," Strangelove said, smiling. "The nuke we are going to launch is an obsolete one, one that has been purposely disabled. So do not worry; even though the missile will cause extensive destruction once it lands, it will not cause as much damage than if it explodes."
"What's the point of launching a nuke if you're essentially wasting it?" Sebastian asked. He suspected something fishy; how can an active warhead be disabled on the fly?
"Well, the men at the base are bored. They have no women, so all that is preoccupied on their minds is unconstructive rage, a want to watonly do violence against other peoples. The launch here will saitate such urges in a fairly constructive manner."
"In addition," Stragelove added, "we had a special request we were obligated to fill."
"Special...request?" Sebastian asked. He raised his other eyebrow.
"Yes. Some guy wanted to ride a bomb."
"What?" Sebastian asked, again.
"Yes indeed. Some guy...I can't remember his name...something Royal Tennisballs? But anyways, like your wife, this Tennisball guy wanted to take his own life. But he considered methods like using the juice to be boring. So he kindly asked us if he could go riding a bomb. We couldn't help but accept his request. After all, we knew what he felt like, for we all were bored. Plus, this Tennisball guy isn't the only one; our own Major King Kong has expressed his desire to do so too."
Suddenly, a distant roar sounded.
"It's starting! The missile's being launched. Oh wait, I'm standing and I'm not even realizing it!" Strangelove turned to Sebastian, his right hand independently fistpumping. "Stanley Kubrick should make a movie on this!"
Sebastian pretended to be amazed as he struggled to see anything through the barbed wire and miles of atmosphere. "Did you know that Stanley Kubrick helped retrieve my wife's body? I bet that's something you didn't know."
As per request, Royal Tenenbaum**, a filmmaker from what used to be Oregon who was slightly less successful than Stanley Kubrick, rode the bomb. Protected from the anoxic environment of the upper atmosphere by a spacesuit bought at the local Sears for $100,000.99, he remained attached to the missile as it raced at thousands of miles an hour via a top-secret formulation of military-grade superglue. Since the spacesuit was relatively cheap, it did not allow anyone, even Royal Tenenbaum himself, to hear him scream, to Royal Tenenbaum's disappointment. He was one of those people who wanted to win at yelling.
As expected, when the missile finally hit the ground, it was immediately destroyed, and Royal Tenenbaum was instantly killed. Dr. Strangelove was also correct in that it did not go off in a nuclear explosion, to many people's relief. However, even though lots of scrap metal ended up being scattered, nobody found the body. Conspiracy theories started to abound. Some of the more extreme nutters wondered if Royal Tenenbaum immediately reincarnated, or was whisked to an alternate universe. Such hypothesis-ses continue to make the rounds on Youtube today.
As to where the missile hit, it landed in Iran, near the capital Isfahan. More precisely, it landed on top of the summer palace of the ambassador to the Divided States of America, who at that time happened to be Danielle Glowinski. Glowinski, after spending an entire week in a hissy-fit over the destruction of her summer palace, eventually completed her five stages of grief and got over her loss. The eventual reconstruction - in which the rebuilt summer palace ended up with an Ayn Rand shrine, recording studio, and missile silo, among other things - ended up taking around 1% of Iran's entire GDP.
* Watch this to get Dr. Strangelove's accent in your head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ihKq34Ozc
**No relation to the Royal Tenenbaum of our universe, despite what the conspiracy theorists say. Or is there?
This is the end, she thought. I'm witnessing the collapse of society a second time. It's like Iran, all over again! Except that...well, this isn't much different from Iran.
Arianne leaned back into her wheelchair. No use living when society just keeps collapsing around you, right? The continuous barking of an anonymous dog was quickly stopped by a quick succession of gunfire.
She looked on her lap. Lying on it was a small bottle of a mostly-orange liquid, with milky-white clouds of something suspended in it. She held it up and examined it closely. Thousands of years ago, an unknown herbalist in northern Korea discovered a fairly useful herbal remedy that has many actual and made-up uses. That was not the liquid Arianne was holding. What she was holding was its precursor, the infamous "juice" of a rare Korean fruit tree. Legend has it that when it was first discovered, the rulers of Korea wiped out a quarter of the Korean race through their intensive testing. Historians continue to debate whether the remedy saved more people's lives than the "juice."
Hands shaking, she unscrewed the bottle cap. "You know," Arianne said to nobody, "I hoped that the future would be better tomorrow. But no, it keeps getting worse. First, you get shot. You never walk again." She took a swallow of saliva. "Then your country collapses, so you must escape. Then you nearly get raped, but you didn't get raped, because someone else got shot. Then you get fired because of who you were with for the past month. Then you get your house burned down by Germans, so you move to your friend's house, which then gets burned by Mexicans. Then because you can never walk again, you get stuck in an unhappy marriage with some loser." She chuckled. "Okay, maybe I exaggerated that last part just a teensy bit."
She took a whiff of the bottle. The "juice" was much like cyanide, in that despite being a deadly poison, it smelled sweet. Specifically, it smelled like apricots.
"And then your country escapes a second time. You know, I hope that the Americans would get their together and do something, like, say, building a robotic exoskeleton or neural implant so I can walk again. But no, they're too conceited and stupid to even do that."
She took a look at the sky one last time. "Now nuclear war is upon is. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. With my luck, I would be one of them. At least, if it weren't for what I'm holding. Better to die than be killed, they say."
Arianne wheeled herself away from the window. "A lot of people have been announcing the end of the world. Economic collapses, environmental degradation, pandemics like the new human immunodeficiency virus, and now this. Everybody then says it depressing. I agree, but I would add this: it's only depressing because it's true."
And so she took a swig at the "juice." Almost instantly, she went into a fit of vomiting, followed by convulsions and finally cardiac arrest. She fell down in front of her wheelchair, in prone position, on the wooden floor. The bottle, still not yet completely empty, slowly rolled out of her hand.
Due to the general chaos of society and whatnot, nobody (not even her husband Sebastian) noticed her death for a week. Even after someone thought Hey Sebastian, why hasn't your wife been showing up lately? it took another day to break down the doors of the Kapoor residence. Incidentally, not everyone involved in retrieving the body knew Arianne (nor vice versa). Among those people included an athletic yet somewhat dim-witted teenager named Forrest Gump and the famous indie filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
* * *
After retrieving his wife's body, Sebastian became a vagabond, traveling in his Ford across the not-yet-post-apocalyptic wasteland. After all, his family has either died, been killed, or became preoccupied with not dying or being killed. He was fired from his job as the editor for The New York Daily News, as maintaining a newspaper company is very difficult if your headquarters has been pillaged, raped, and burned. Without a purpose in life, Sebastian became content with simply wandering the remains of America, with only the food and clothes he brought or could procure. Eventually, his supplies, be it food or gasoline, would run out, and he knew this. There was still enough "juice" in Arianne's bottle for one more person, as it turned out.
One day, while wandering through some cornfields of Kaskaskia, Sebastian came across a military installation. Nuclear missle silo, Sebastian guessed correctly. The complex was a dreary gray that stuck out from the boring brown of dead corn. It was pretty big too, so big that the buildings themselves were visually blurred by the atmosphere.
There was a person by the barbed wire fence; he seemed like the only person other than Sebastian in a hundred mile radius. The man was in a wheelchair, slightly leaning to one side. There was no car, nor any other indication of how the man might've gotten there, near him. On closer inspection, the man was impeccably dressed and was perfectly clean (unlike Sebastian or any other normal post-apocalyptic survivor). His silver hair was perfectly moussed, and his glasses were like a pair of window panes. On one arm of his wheelchair, his left hand seemed to have a firm clasp of his right.
As Sebastian drove closer to the man, he seemed to grew more familiar. He has been on TV, that's a fact Sebastian knew. But Sebastian simply couldn't pin who he was down. It was like there were a million faces in his head, faces of both the living and the dead, and had to flip through them one by one.
"I zee thet you heve stupped by fur a veezit!" the man said in a pronounced accent.* German accent, it seemed.
Sebastian, not knowing if the other guy could or would kill him, stepped out of his car. "Morning," he said, not knowing that it was afternoon.
"Morning to you too!"
"Say," Sebastian said as he closed the door, "I seem to recognize you from television. Are you..." It clicked in him. "Dr. Strangelove, the nation...um...yeah, nation's premier expert on nuclear weapons. Say, O Dr. Strangelove, what has brought you here to this particular installation?"
"We have a special event coming up," Dr. Strangelove answered. "The more important question is, perhaps, why are you here?"
"It's complicated, really. Um...I'd rather not discuss."
"Wait," Dr. Strangelove said as his right hand shot into the air, pointing at nothing. "I know what it is! Your wife, Arianne Kapoor, née Khorasani, has committed suicide from drinking the Infamous Korean juice! And you, my friend, are her husband Sebastian Kapoor, Punjabi immigrant and fired newspaper editor editor!"
"Wait...what?" Sebastian froze. "What?"
"'What?' Dr. Strangelove imitated. 'What? What is all this? What is all that?'"
"This is serious!" Sebastian said. "You can't just dig up all my private details like that? How were you able to do so anyways? Did the government keep Browder's secret police or something, even as it descended into anarchy?"
"Reasons, my friend," Dr. Strangelove said, his hand pointing to his left, to the missile silo. "Reasons, of not all of which I know of. But one thing is for sure - I know Arianne."
"Really?" Sebastian asked.
"Yes. I remember being in the very same accident that disabled Arianne. It disabled me es well - except that I can actually walk now, except that I don't feel like it - and gave me...this...stupid..." - Strangelove grabbed his anomalous hand - "hand!"
"Really?" Sebastian questioned. He raised an eyebrow. "You mean the UN Shooting of 1921? I thought you were German! Surely there weren't any German foreign exchange students involved, right?"
"Um, yes, but I used to be American." Strangelove, his hand firmly in other hand, paused. "Or maybe you're right, maybe I had always been German. You know, there's a lot about my past that I don't remember. Like for example, I used to have a first name, before I settled on 'Doktor Merkwürdigliebe'. What was it? I don't know! At least it's nothing I don't regret."
Sebastian contemplated on how a man who knows other peoples' personal information doesn't even recall his own name, let alone his own past.
"Maybe it was in a past life, and in that past life, I was Indian. If so, that would explain why I believe in past lives. Or maybe not. Maybe my indecision is what's causing people to say that I have brain damage, an accusation which I vehemently deny. Oh well; doesn't matter. The UN building is abandoned now, full of mice and holes."
"But anyways," Strangelove continued. "I'm here to witness a special event. Today, we're going to launch a nuclear weapon!"
"What?" Sebastian cried. Even as the apocalypse commenced, nuclear warfare was always a distant thing in his mind. But now, even if he wasn't on the receiving end of a nuke, he would bear witness to the awesome power of the nadir of what men can spawn.
"Do not worry," Strangelove said, smiling. "The nuke we are going to launch is an obsolete one, one that has been purposely disabled. So do not worry; even though the missile will cause extensive destruction once it lands, it will not cause as much damage than if it explodes."
"What's the point of launching a nuke if you're essentially wasting it?" Sebastian asked. He suspected something fishy; how can an active warhead be disabled on the fly?
"Well, the men at the base are bored. They have no women, so all that is preoccupied on their minds is unconstructive rage, a want to watonly do violence against other peoples. The launch here will saitate such urges in a fairly constructive manner."
"In addition," Stragelove added, "we had a special request we were obligated to fill."
"Special...request?" Sebastian asked. He raised his other eyebrow.
"Yes. Some guy wanted to ride a bomb."
"What?" Sebastian asked, again.
"Yes indeed. Some guy...I can't remember his name...something Royal Tennisballs? But anyways, like your wife, this Tennisball guy wanted to take his own life. But he considered methods like using the juice to be boring. So he kindly asked us if he could go riding a bomb. We couldn't help but accept his request. After all, we knew what he felt like, for we all were bored. Plus, this Tennisball guy isn't the only one; our own Major King Kong has expressed his desire to do so too."
Suddenly, a distant roar sounded.
"It's starting! The missile's being launched. Oh wait, I'm standing and I'm not even realizing it!" Strangelove turned to Sebastian, his right hand independently fistpumping. "Stanley Kubrick should make a movie on this!"
Sebastian pretended to be amazed as he struggled to see anything through the barbed wire and miles of atmosphere. "Did you know that Stanley Kubrick helped retrieve my wife's body? I bet that's something you didn't know."
* * *
As per request, Royal Tenenbaum**, a filmmaker from what used to be Oregon who was slightly less successful than Stanley Kubrick, rode the bomb. Protected from the anoxic environment of the upper atmosphere by a spacesuit bought at the local Sears for $100,000.99, he remained attached to the missile as it raced at thousands of miles an hour via a top-secret formulation of military-grade superglue. Since the spacesuit was relatively cheap, it did not allow anyone, even Royal Tenenbaum himself, to hear him scream, to Royal Tenenbaum's disappointment. He was one of those people who wanted to win at yelling.
As expected, when the missile finally hit the ground, it was immediately destroyed, and Royal Tenenbaum was instantly killed. Dr. Strangelove was also correct in that it did not go off in a nuclear explosion, to many people's relief. However, even though lots of scrap metal ended up being scattered, nobody found the body. Conspiracy theories started to abound. Some of the more extreme nutters wondered if Royal Tenenbaum immediately reincarnated, or was whisked to an alternate universe. Such hypothesis-ses continue to make the rounds on Youtube today.
As to where the missile hit, it landed in Iran, near the capital Isfahan. More precisely, it landed on top of the summer palace of the ambassador to the Divided States of America, who at that time happened to be Danielle Glowinski. Glowinski, after spending an entire week in a hissy-fit over the destruction of her summer palace, eventually completed her five stages of grief and got over her loss. The eventual reconstruction - in which the rebuilt summer palace ended up with an Ayn Rand shrine, recording studio, and missile silo, among other things - ended up taking around 1% of Iran's entire GDP.
* Watch this to get Dr. Strangelove's accent in your head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ihKq34Ozc
**No relation to the Royal Tenenbaum of our universe, despite what the conspiracy theorists say. Or is there?
