Walking downtown the other day, I was confronted by a desperate, unkempt man holding a stained, grubby manuscript scrawled with the words "For CBC eyes only."
He pressed the filthy pile of papers into my hands with pleading eyes and then was gone. Normally such spirit and passion would be quickly tossed into the recycling bin but another dandelion outbreak possessed my lawn. I couldn`t let the pernicious yellow interlopers prevail yet again so I decided it`ll do for my column this week.
This is Not a Drill by Dr. Bugalow Boogie
Chapter 1
Near the bowels of the city, the mayor scratched the belly of her angry dog Spitz and dreamed of a town where everyone worked and no one had to pay.
"Soon," she said, ruffling Spitz`s precisely parted hair, matched by a perfect tie. "Soon, we`ll cut out the heart of this city in order to save it.``
Her name was Three-and-a-half of Nine and she had been bred by business, forged by like minds, then voted in by taxpayers for one purpose: to eliminate the fetid waste, corruption, and bone idleness choking her city like a particularly tight cashmere sweater. Half-clockwork, some computer, part-calculator, she ate red tape and spat out the bottom line.
But she couldn't do it alone, so she`d hired other like minds from the confusing firm of RPMG. Together, in a square lair under downtown, they would conduct a Cored Renew, where they`d take the insides out of the bad apple and replace it with workings that were more efficient and just as tasty.
Only a machine modelled on Three-and-a-half was up to the task and so together they built the Leaner, a tentacled beast made of saws and scalpels, eyes and ears. It was working from the inside out, cutting the fat, trimming useless limbs and cauterizing anything that wasn`t burned.
"Oh Spitz, why must resistence be so futile? Don`t they understand that less is beautiful?"
Her allies understood. Overseeing RPMG and the Leaner was Dr. Kwirklyke, a Kubrickian figure who liked notional socialism.
"Mein Fraction," he said with an accent as thick and as hard as three-day-old Black Forest wedding cake. He waved a pair of scissors above his head. "I can screw!"
"Cut, Herr Doctor, cut. What are you working on?"
"I have reinvented the pen, Mein Fraction!"
Dr. Kwirklyke gestured to an image on a bank of computer screens. "Your weak language has two pens. One for the writing, one for the cattle. Too inefficent! Put them together - many writers, one pen."
On the screen, city workers sat strapped and caged to a contraption, plugs running into their brains, tubes running into their wrists. A spool of paper with red writing ran out of one end where a man would randomly rubber stamp it.
"The workers supply the ink! We only need one pen for the entire city!" crowed Kwirklyke.
"Genius, Herr Doctor. What's next?" Spitz wagged his tail. As they walked away, one of the tubes burst loose from a worker, spraying blood. Another started screaming. The writing turned into a single flat line but the man kept rubber stamping it.
The next screen showed the city's fire brigade pouring buckets filled with holes onto a raging inferno.
"The city's library. Too inefficent, no revenue generation. Solution: Burn it all and use the resulting raw materials to fill the potholes!"
"Again, brilliant Herr Doctor. But what about the librarians?"
"Don't worry Mein Fraction, they were in the library. Nothing goes to waste!"
Spitz promptly wet himself.
Suddenly alarms filled the square lair as Spitz barked and chewed off Kwirklyke's leg. An RPMG man rushed to Three-and-a-Half's side.
"Perimeter breach, ma'am. Frazzled and the Blower have come with the Locals to stop the Leaner!"
"The Blower, Mein Fraction? What does he blow?"
"Whistles apparently, Herr Doctor."
