My friend Mikey hates waking up early every day.
He wishes he had the Sleep Till Noon gene.
What he doesn’t know is that such a gene exists, and a well-known bioengineering firm has recently sequenced it.
Most of their research is still in the lab, but they have applied for a patent with a genetically-modified corn with the gene.
It’s corn that sleeps till noon.
The idea behind it is that the corn will sleep till noon, so the farmer can harvest it while it sleeps.
Cruelty-free corn harvesting!
(Unlike normal genetically-modified corn, which screams really loud when harvested.)
Tag: science fiction
The Land of The Lost
Every time I do laundry, I always find an extra sock or shirt in there.
Extra knives show up in my kitchen drawers. Strange keys and wallets on my nightstand.
It’s frustrating, but it happens to everyone, right?
My grandmother told me about a place where things disappeared all the time: socks from the laundry, keys from your pocket, and even pickles off of hamburgers you got from the drive-through window.
“And they show up here,” she said.
People called her crazy, and one day, she wasn’t in her room.
I wonder if she showed up in the other place.
The Gates
Devils despise the rule of The Lord, but there are unwilling servants among the angels, too.
They sat on a park bench, a malcontent seraphim and one of the damned.
“Did you bring it?” growled the devil.
The angel took out a bundle and unwrapped it, revealing a shiny iron bar.
“From right under Peter’s nose.”
The devil pulled out another iron bar, rusty and pitted.
“Let’s make them sing,” he said.
The devil and angel picked up their iron bars and swung them at each other.
The Universal Bell rang louder than existence, and the stars began to fade.
What On Earth?
Everybody’s going to the new salon on Fifth Street.
For some reason, it’s all the rage, but the styles they come up with are dreadful.
“You look like you stuck your finger in a light socket,” I told my friend. Her hair was standing a foot tall from her head. “What on earth made you do such a thing?”
Then I caught a sparkle inside her hair. The updo was meant to conceal an antenna.
But there was a fully-exposed pod on the back of her neck. No coverage at all.
They might conquer earth, but they’ll never be in-style.
Hear The Horns
The world is out of sync.
Maybe God got the speed of sound and the speed of light got mixed up this morning, but now I hear things before I see them.
The alarm going off before the clock showed 6.
Birds singing on empty telephone wires.
I try to cross the street and I hear cars honking, the screeching of brakes.
But it’s a red light. The WALK sign is lit.
I am crushed to the curb.
Hit by a car?
People shouting. Sirens. Unseen hands lift me.
So much pain.
I still haven’t seen what hit me yet.
Pulsation
“Pulsation: Pulsation is the act of pulsating,” mumbled Dictionary.
Dictionary is Steve’s little brother. He’s retarded or something, but special.
You can tell him a word, and he’ll give you the definition.
We ask him a few bad words and laugh at him.
Then we ask him a few nonsense words, and he holds his head and screams.
But then, hearing “Zuatha” he stopped.
“Zuatha: Zuatha is a insectoid hive-mind species that has developed faster-than-light technology and routinely observe-”
That’s all Dictionary said before the room was filled with a bright white light.
The light vanished.
And so did Dictionary.
Elves Live
Happy The Elf woke up in the North Pole Infirmary.
His head hurt. Everything looked weird.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You had a rough Christmas,” says the lab technicians, putting equipment on a cart. “Everyone did. But you’re all fine now.”
Happy looked around and saw all the other elves in the Infirmary, in various states of stupor and lucidity.
Santa watched them through a one-way mirror.
“Poor bastards,” he said. “They have no memory of the Hell I put them through every year.”
“And neither do you, you old bastard” said a technician, sliding a needle into Santa’s neck.
Pay The Price
I was losing my hearing, but I couldn’t afford the surgery to repair it.
So, I got financial assistance from a corporation.
Now, I can hear again, but I also hear advertising.
When I walk by a restaurant, their ad plays in my ear.
“Michael, you deserve a break today,” says the voice, calling me out by name.
I want the ads to stop, but my doctor says the cost of ad-free implants is not covered by my plan.
And under his Doctors Union contract, he can’t remove them.
So that’s why I’m here with the mirrors and the drill.
Sitting very still.
Robot Replacements
The owner of the factory looked at the productivity reports and sighed.
His workers were shiftless and lazy, so he decided to replace them with robots.
The robots tried to get the work done, but their output still wasn’t what he’d hoped for.
Then, the idea struck him: What if the robots were shiftless and lazy?
He had them reprogrammed and started the factory back up.
The robots turned out to be even more efficient than humans at shirking their duties. One robot could shirk the duties of ten men.
He gave up on the factory business, building politicians instead.
Twins
I was so simple before.
If you have two genetically identical children at the same time, they’re called twins.
But if you take one embryo and implant it in another woman, are they still twins?
What if you take one egg, replicate it a few times, and implant them all together?
Twins? Triplets? Quadruplets?
And what if you don’t implant them all at once? Maybe wait a year or two between pregnancies?
Are they now clones?
It’s so confusing. Makes it hard to buy just the right card, too.
Are you my brother?
Are you my mother?
Are you… me?