Perfect Humans
Back in 2016, I was busy writing science fiction stories.
I ended up writing this story called “Barbie and Ken Discover Hell” – where the two “perfect” humans Barbie and Ken – lands on a new planet.
Barbie & Ken
Barbie and Ken are:
- Pretty
- Healthy
- Happy
–but also somewhat:
- Normal
- Dumb
- Superficial
The word “basic” comes to mind!
Well.
New Planet
They discover this new planet, and soon learns two things:
- This planet will not let anything LEAVE
- This planet will not let anything DIE
This strange phenomenon has created a local phenomenon called “Suicide Junkies” – people who are busy “killing” themselves over and over again!
At the exact moment they “die”, they achieve something called “non-local consciousness”, and attain the state of “Ultimate Nirvana”.
Which can be described as a perfect injection of – SYNTHETIC HEROIN – raised to the power of itself.
Well.
This pleasure is so extreme, that once you achieve it, you will spend the rest of your miserable life trying to reach it again.
Yes.
Spiritual Awakening
They find this man who first tries to leave the planet’s atmosphere, fails, then jumps off his ship to land head first on a very hard rock.
This confident man goats Ken into taking the jump, which he does. Ken has a “spiritual awakening”. Barbie freaks out, and they run head first into a sandstorm the size of Texas.
Ultimate Nirvana
Barbie also feels a strange attraction to this hairy middle aged man. This man who spends all his money on fuel, in order to leave the planet, and then jump from his ship again and again.
A good jump gives you 2.5 Seconds of “Ultimate Nirvana”.
A “good jump” means:
- Head first
- Landing on rock
- Maximum acceleration
But the “perfect jump”, which CRUSHES every single vertebrae in your spine, gives you 3.5 Seconds.
Poetic
This story is somewhat poetic.
If you read the beginning, and then the end, you will see that they mirror each other – but with a twist!
Anyway.
Here is the story!
Barbie and Ken Discover Hell
by Theo Alexander Gerken
I
It was ironic that the two best representations of humanity were made in a lab.
Oh, but they were, strong, beautiful, healthy, happy people.
Man and Woman, Adam and Eve, Barbie and Ken — they went by many names, and they were the blueprint of everything sound and normal.
They looked like brother and sister — and when they made love, they liked it just enough, not too much, not too little.
II
Barbie and Ken were in a spaceship sent from Earth to do a first time visit on the planet “Inverto”.
Inverto was discovered by the telescope EUCALYPTUS some years ago, and subsequent scanning showed that the planet had an atmosphere, life, and probably intelligent life.
Barbie and Ken’s mission was to go there, investigate, penetrate the cultural barrier in the presence of intelligent life, sample the environment, and spread the seed of humanity by reproducing.
Making babies was the easy part, for even though they looked like brother and sister, even though they were the norm of humanity in every possible way, even though they had no character quirks to play around with, they still had a reasonable amount of attraction for each other, and they relished the opportunity of getting between the sheets and make some good-looking babies.
III
The ship approached Inverto’s atmosphere, which spread out before them in blue-green array.
“Let’s go transparent, shall we? Just like that bikini I packed for you in that bag you have!” Ken said and drove a playful elbow into Barbie’s ribs.
“No, you didn’t! You would never do that!” Barbie answered and slapped Ken over the shoulder.
“Transparent, affirmative,” the ship answered, and the hull of the ship became transparent.
The ship breached the atmosphere.
“What is that?” Barbie looked towards a small grey oval-shaped object rising in the sky.
“That would be an object,” Ken stated matter-of-factly.
“Yes but… what kind of object is it? It seems to be moving away from the planet, just as we are going in.”
Ken’s eyebrows furrowed as he tried to come up with some kind of joke. He spotted a dark green vase with orange and yellow flowers in it sitting on a low table, but failed to make anything out of the observation.
“That’s not the only thing going into something tonight! Haha!” Ken laughed like he had just hit a comedic homerun. Barbie let out a long, polite, effeminate laughter, joining her husband from beginning to end.
She stepped up to Ken, pressing her two round breasts hard against his body.
“Oh, Ken, I’m lucky I’m with you.”
Ken put his arms around her, completely surrounding her with his thick long arms.
“Luckiest girl in the world, that’d be you, luckiest guy in the world, that’d be me. Or that vase over there, haha!”
She made herself laugh again, but with less elegance this time. The earlier laughter didn’t seem to require willpower — this one did.
“Ahem,” the ship interrupted, “that is a ship attempting to leave the atmosphere, and it just bounced off some sort of invisible wall we must have passed through on our way here. This is due to physics or technology unknown to me.”
Barbie looked at the distant ship and saw a tiny dot appear beside it.
“What is that?” she asked.
“This,” Ken grabbed her supple bottom with both hands, ”is my growing affection for you my sweetie pumpkin pie with lots of whipped cream on top of it.”
“No, not that. I mean that thing over there.”
Ken looked up from the perfectly sculpted thing that was his wife.
“That is interesting. Can we fly over there and have a look?”
“We certainly can,” the ship answered and changed direction.
As they flew over there, the small grey ship flew towards the ground and disappeared out of sight. The tiny dot was its pilot who had ejected himself into the air.
It was a curious sight; for it was a human, a man of 40-something, with no visible gear on, with bared upper body and tight black pants, free falling towards the ground with closed eyes and a huge grin on his face.
“Holy moly!” Ken lifted his arms into the air in a gesture of excitement, “That is a smiling man. I know a smiling man when I see one. That means there are humans on this planet, and that they have advanced technology.”
“Oh, Ken,” she said in her typical way, “your deductive skills are off the charts.”
“I just happen to know a thing or two, that’s all,” he muttered confidently and patted her on the head, completely unaware that his fragile male ego had been soothed.
Barbie ran up to the see-through wall and pressed her cute little nose against it.
“He is so… alive. I’ve never seen so much emotion on a human face,” she said dreamily.
“That is incorrect. We might have spent most of our lives on this spaceship, but in the movie The Mask we saw with Jim Carrey the other night, there was more emotion on his face than this man’s.”
“But this is real. Have you ever seen a real human smile like that?”
Ken walked up to the window beside Barbie and looked concerned.
“I must confess that I have not, and that’s what worries me. He could display any emotions of fear, sadness, anger, yes even relief, but not happiness. Something is going on here, and I don’t like it.”
Barbie pushed her blood red lips against the window, kissing it gently.
“Maybe… maybe he didn’t have such a good life. Maybe he was in a lot of pain,” her tongue licked the window at the word ‘pain’, “the books tell us not all humans are happy, it is possible to exist and not be happy.”
Ken placed his hands on his hips, forming two triangles with his arms.
“You make a damn fine point there, darling, a damn fine point. But no human falling head first towards the ground should smile like that. It’s not natural.”
“Shall I save him?” the ship interjected.
“We need to take action to save this unfortunate fellow,” Ken spoke like a true gentleman.
“Sure, why not,” Barbie said as casually as she could muster, scanning the man from head to toe, with a delayed glance at his midsection.
The ship fell in beside the man, nudged him in the air so he lay horizontal to the ground, positioned itself under him like a carpet, and started decelerating.
When the man felt the smooth roof of the ship against his skin, he stopped smiling, opened his eyes, and started flailing with his arms like a madman while uttering a string of harsh sounds resembling German.
He tried to stand up on the roof and jump off, and made several attempts to do so, but the ship always compensated for his movements and countered each attempt easily.
The ship traveled straight down, and landed on a large flat brown rock in the middle of a sandy desert.
They escorted the dispirited man off the roof to the ground. He walked like an old man, like a cripple, all hunched over, like he had just received a death sentence or a standing order to go to a prison camp.
“Let go off me!” he snapped and yanked himself free from their grip.
They looked at him, shocked.
“You know English?” Ken asked.
“You understand us?” Barbie followed.
“Why did you do that?!” the man yelled and clawed at his face with his hands.
“Jeez louise — we saved your life, that’s what we did. I don’t think you have to be mad about it. Saving someone’s life is a good thing,” Ken turned to Barbie, “wouldn’t you say it’s a good thing, darling, saving someone’s life?”
“I’m interested in what he has to say.”
The man spun around, stepped forward, leapt into the air with the arms along his sides, and face-planted on the hard brown rock without dampening the fall with his hands.
Barbie ran up to him, knelt beside him, and rolled him over on his back.
“Oh my god, you sweet you, are you okay?” she said with great affection in her voice.
But there he lay, without a scratch or blemish on his face, with clear blue eyes staring up into the sky, and a sour mouth below them.
“We’re all English speakers here, we come from Earth, from the Seeder Explorer ship Vargas that landed here over 800 years ago.”
“We thought that ship was swallowed by a black hole. Why haven’t you sent any signals or contacted us in some way?” Ken asked.
The man was upset by the question and his face became red like a tomato.
“You stupid – lousy – moron – idiot! Did you not see what happened to my ship? They won’t let you leave, they won’t let anything leave!”
“Who are ‘they’?” Ken asked slowly, as if he was treading dangerous ground.
The man started talking fast, and spitting as he did so.
“The spirit, the entity, whatever evil thing that is ruling this place! Nobody understands it, but everybody tries to work around it. You completely sabotaged my weekend, now I have to wait two weeks before I can go up again, that’s two weeks!” the man started sobbing and buried his face in Barbie’s breasts, who was kneeling above him.
“There there, what is it that pains you so much, that two weeks makes you cry like that?”
“I’m tired… I’m tired of being trapped like this. This planet won’t set you free, it won’t let you be free, even for a single minute,” the man said as a new wave of sobs hit him.
Ken assumed a puzzled look on his face — like he was facing a puzzle that might not have a solution
“I need a drink. Don’t let him get up. Call on me if he tries anything,” he said and went inside the ship. Five minutes later, he reappeared with three strawberry vanilla milkshakes in his hands.
Barbie and the man were in the same position as before, she was leaning over him, and her breasts were very wet from his tears. Her nipples were visible through her white top — something Ken didn’t miss.
Ken shot the man a suspicious glance and put two of the milkshakes on the ground by the man’s head.
“Why did you try to kill yourself?”
“I tried to do what to myself?”
“You jumped out of an airplane with no parachute, even though it was working properly and could land by itself without you. Why did you do that?”
“This place is a prison, a man does what he can to escape it, even if it’s just for a second.”
“So you tried to leave this planet, could not, and when that failed you were so disappointed you decided to kill yourself?”
“Here’s that word again, ‘kill’, I don’t understand it!” the man said and buried his face deeper in Barbie’s boobs, who answered with more affection.
“You better not be faking this…. because if you are… take your milkshake and stop whining!”
“Ken! I’ve never seen you like this! The poor guy is in pain, he needs emotional support not a dog’s bark,” Barbie ran her fingers along the man’s neck and intertwined them in his chest hair — like she had done so many times with Ken.
Ken took two laps around the ship and came back.
“Alright. Okay. Let’s begin from square one. Why don’t you tell us what you think we need to hear to understand this situation correctly.”
Barbie handed the man his milkshake — he drank it eagerly from her hands. His face lightened up as he finished the whole thing in fifteen long drawn-out seconds.
“This is good, real good, it makes me less depressed about being trapped. See, every two weeks I get a paycheck, like everyone, I spend most of that paycheck on fuel so I can fly up into the sky and maybe, just maybe, breach the atmosphere, enter space, open all the doors to the ship and be free forever, you know?”
“Keep going,” Ken said.
“But that never happens, because this force won’t let you leave. So what you do is, you eject yourself from your ship, fall all that way and smash into the rock real hard. I mean real hard! If you do that, you get to be free for about three seconds before the force puts you back together again.”
Ken put his milkshake to his mouth and observed a small collection of dust in the horizon — it seemed to be moving from side to side.
“You fly high up in the sky, try breach the atmosphere and enter space — not to go anywhere, but so that you can open the doors to the ship and be ‘free’. You eject yourself from the ship, gain terminal velocity at two hundred something kilometers an hour — not use a parachute, but to fall face first on the rock and become ‘free’.”
“Yes?” the man said impatiently, as if Ken was stating obvious facts and boring him.
“When you say ‘free’ do you mean ‘dead’ — as in, the body stops working?” Ken asked with smug pride, like a detective who had spotted an important clue.
But the only answer that came from the man’s lips was a long “Mmmmmm,” for Barbie had handed him her milkshake, which he drank greedily from her hands with a blank expression on his face aimed at her breasts.
He looked like an overgrown infant breastfeeding on Ken’s wife.
His pride turned into anger.
“This needs to stop, right now! Both of you! Knock it off!”
“Ken!” Barbie sat up straight and accidentally knocked the milkshake out of the man’s hands.
“May I interfere and bring some clarity to the situation?” the ship asked politely.
“Go ahead,” Barbie and Ken said in unison, for they always listened to the ship.
“Alright. It seems like the English language has remained intact, with the exception of two words, ‘life’, and ‘death’, for they have been replaced by ‘trapped’, and ‘free’ respectively.”
“Can you clarify that?” Ken asked impatiently.
“Please do,” Barbie chipped in.
“Yes. On this planet, when they say the word ‘trapped’, it means ‘life’, ‘to live’, ‘to be alive’. And when they say the word ‘free’, it means ‘death’, ‘to die’, ‘to be killed’. They somehow equate life to the state of being ‘trapped’, and death to the state of being ‘free’.”
“That’s weird,” Barbie said.
“That’s is weird” Ken echoed, sounding like a mindless robot.
The ship continued.
“Let me explain. There is a mysterious presence on this planet that will not allow any living thing to leave it, and, it will not allow any living thing to die. If a body is damaged to the point of not functioning, it will behave as a dead body until this ‘force’ fixes it, if I may call it that.
“This is what this man tried to achieve when he ejected himself from his ship. That is why he jumped from that height, head first, aiming for the very rock we are resting our weight upon right now. The goal of this jump was to achieve nonlocal consciousness, to separate his consciousness from his body, because that is what happens when you die, and that is the best feeling in the world.”
“The best feeling in the world? I don’t think so,” Ken said in disbelief and looked at Barbie as if he hoped she wasn’t having a good time with the man.
Barbie adjusted her position self-consciously and moved away from the man slightly as Ken repeated the words ‘best feeling in the world’.
The ship continued.
“This explains why he was happy, and why he was smiling. He knew he would exist in this desirable state for at least a couple seconds before his body was repaired by the force.
“In your terms: he jumped to move his body from the state of life to the state of death, to achieve nonlocal consciousness.
In their terms: he jumped to move his consciousness from the the state of being trapped inside a physical body, to the state of being free of it, achieving nonlocal consciousness, or, as they call it, ‘the bliss of infinite consciousness’.
“I need not take full credit for this insight, for I have had the information advantage of having watched hundreds of other people all over the planet do the exact same thing as this man attempted, over these last fifteen minutes, ever since we breached the atmosphere. He is not the exception, he is the norm.”
“Finally someone who gets it!” the man exclaimed up into the sky, “although you certainly are trying,” he moved his gaze from Barbie’s glistening cleavage to her deep blue eyes.
Barbie’s cheeks grew red, and she hid it from Ken by arching her neck and looking slightly downwards.
Ken paced around them slowly with the hands around his back, with the posture and form of an English gentleman, or a nazi interrogator.
“Being dead feels better to you than being alive?”
“That’s correct, mister,” the man answered formally.
“Would you consider yourself… a happy man?” Ken continued rhetorically.
“I would consider myself pretty average when it comes to that sort of stuff. We’re all descendants from the designer humans that came here eight hundred years ago — so it’s not like depression is in our DNA or anything.”
“Because… one can easily grasp why death is an appealing option for an unhappy person, but not for a happy one.”
The man stared at Ken like his pacing and formal manners and never-ending questions started to irritate him.
“You can be trapped inside the King’s palace eating the best grapes in the universe right off the naked oiled up bodies of creatures like this one here, freedom is still the superior optio—”
“Hey, that’s my wife you’re talking about!” Ken attempted to kick the man’s head, but stopped himself at the last second, kicking dust into the man’s face instead.
The man sat up and pointed at Barbie’s boobs.
“Are these real, by the way? Did they attach them before or after she left the test tube? They sure are wonderful.”
“Stop hitting on my wife! Get away from that toxic lowlife!” Ken yelled in high pitched voice as he yanked Barbie away from the man back towards the ship.
The man stood up and spoke to Ken’s back.
“If you’re such a big macho guy, perfect genes and all, why don’t you do what I did — with me — and we’ll see who comes out on top. We’ll see if you don’t prefer being free, or ‘dead’ as you call it — after all.” His voice was smooth and confident, and the words rolled off his tongue with great force.
“I sure as hell will!” Ken yelled and pushed a reluctant Barbie into the ship.
“Fine,” the man answered and walked in after them.
The ship took off and flew towards the exact spot where they had found the man in the air.
Barbie picked the only the only chair in the ship that was equally far away from both men, sat down in it and stared straight ahead, keeping a neutral expression on her face.
As the ship gained altitude, the man started smirking, the smirk grew and grew, and eventually a big fat smile covered his entire face. He radiated a kind of aggressive exuberance — a mix between excitement and joy and spite.
Ken refused to look his way.
“Location achieved,” the ship said.
“Perfect. Do we go about this any special way? Is it important to land on your head, for example?” Ken asked in a formal tone.
“If you land on your head you get maximum reward, because it does the most to misalign your body. If your neck is completely relaxed upon impact, you’re looking at two point five seconds in heaven, before you’re snapped back into hell,” the man answered.
“I see. Head first, relaxed neck, anything else?”
“Just the doing of it,” the man glanced over at Barbie at the words ‘doing of it’, who shifted in her seat for the first time since takeoff.
“Ship, open the door, I’m going first,” Ken said bravely, like a knight accepting a duel to the death.
The door opened. It revealed orange desert, grey mountains, and blue sky — just visible behind thick fog. A gust of wind blew into the ship. The ship spoke up.
“I recommend that you jump in thirty-one seconds. The winds have picked up, if you jump now you will be blown off course and land on sand, not on rock.”
“Absolutely,” Ken said and whispered to himself, “you want your head to smash into rock, not sand.”
“28… 27… 26…” the ship counted.
Ken faced the opening, stumbled on his foot, but pretended it was part of a stretching exercise. He couldn’t show this man he was scared of heights.
“23… 22… 21…”
The terrible vision of endless open space came up before him. Ken’s right leg began twitching.
“18… 17… 16…”
He solved it by jumping up and down on the balls of his feet. He looked but looked away. He pretended to be glared by the sun, and used his hand to block the vision completely.
“13… 12… 11…”
He removed his hand but had to put it back again.
“I’m not scared of heights, I’m not scared of heights, I’m not scare-” Ken lip synced in the semi-darkness behind his hand.
“8… 7… 6…”
He stopped jumping, removed his hand and started squinting so that the only thing he could see was the blurred opening of the door.
“3…2…1…”
Ken assumed the poise of a high jumper — and with a slight stutter, while squinting more than ever, he launched himself into the air with the form and purpose of a professional diver.
The man turned to Barbie.
“The poor guy almost peed his pants. You’re married to a real war hero.”
Barbie burst out laughing but restrained herself immediately.
“What’s you deal?” she asked.
“What is my deal? What do you mean?”
“I keep looking at you, and I keep wondering what your deal is.”
The man glanced down at Ken who was disappearing into the clouds.
“You’re alone on a deserted island. You get to pick between me and your husband,” he paused and looked at Barbie “to eat for dinner — who do you go with?”
Barbie laughed again, and had more trouble restraining herself this time.
“That wasn’t even funny,” she said.
“My deal is, that I say crazy shit. I make women laugh and I make them feel alive, but I can’t hold down a job, a relationship, or anything else that requires sustained effort. You’re attracted to me, all women are, and it feels kinda funny and strange and dangerous for you, but for me it’s just another day in the office. You husband doesn’t have any edge, that’s why I’m so appealing.”
“I feel like if you were trying to seduce me you wouldn’t be saying all of this.”
“That’s right, I wouldn’t mind if you cheated on your husband with me though, it was eight hundred years since a woman like you visited this planet.” He met her eyes.
When she didn’t answer, he stood up, walked over to the open door and fell over like a loaf of bread.
Still sitting on her chair, Barbie followed him with her gaze through the floor until he, too, disappeared into the clouds.
“Fly down to the stone platform,” she ordered the ship.
The ship flew down to the stone platform and waited for the men. Barbie asked the ship where the men would land, and made sure to face another direction.
Ken came first.
There was a sickening thump, eerily similar to a cannon shot — louder but with less edge to the sound. The vibration of the impact went through the stone, through the ship, into Barbie’s feet, up her legs, and tingled her spine.
There was no blood, the force wouldn’t allow it. Just a big undefined blob of skin with legs sticking out to the sides. She looked and turned away — she recognized her husband’s legs by the well ironed marine blue Khaki pants he wore.
Then came the crackling sounds — the high sharp sounds of calcium-rich bones repairing and realigning themselves to their original shape.
Snap! Crack! Crack! Pop!
She put her hands over her ears and yelled “Lalalalala,” but she heard it anyway.
Two point two seconds later, Ken was whole again, lying on his back, staring up into the sky, not moving a muscle.
“There was no pain, I expected a lot of pain,” he said, paused and blinked, “I was so happy…. I’ve never been so happy in my entire life.”
Thirteen seconds later, the man dropped down from the sky like a human missile — crashing in to the stone at an angle, causing a series of ratatata sounds as he did so.
This was due to the fact that he had angled his body so his head hit the ground first, then the top vertebrae in his neck, then the second, then the third, all the way down to the lowest vertebrae in the spine, with decreasing accuracy the further down the spine the collision traveled.
This was done to demolish every single vertebra in his spine, giving him a bonus second of “freedom”, or “death”. Three point five seconds later, the man lay on the stone, on his back, unharmed.
By this time, the wind had picked up, and a sandstorm that looked like a wall of sand was approaching them from way of the ship — toward the mountains.
Barbie went outside. Her shiny long golden hair whipped back and forth like a pendulum gone haywire. She grabbed it with one hand and used her other to shield her eyes from the sandy wind.
“How’s it going, boys? Did you see the light?” she said playfully, placing herself between the men in a solid stance.
The man lay there with a vacant and satisfied expression on his face, like a heroin addict who just took a big hit of the best stuff, and had retreated into himself.
Ken was motionless also, and his pupils were large as if he’d just taken ecstasy.
“Honey, I became the light. I became everything and nothing at the same time. It was very strange… but beautiful and wonderful.”
“So the ship was right, you consciousness became… nonlocal? Whatever that means.”
Ken pushed himself up to a sitting position, it was awkward as if he hadn’t used his arms in a while. He then stood up and grabbed Barbie’s shoulders.
“It was an out-of-the-body experience the size of the universe. What do you think that felt like? What do you think that felt like, my dear, sweet, wife?” he said in a slightly condescending way.
“You have this strange tone in your voice, you don’t talk like you used to. You sound like a successful salesman, that’s what you sound like.”
Ken glanced over at the man, who was entirely pleased to be left out of the conversation. He let go of her shoulders and grabbed one of her hands instead, inspecting the fine lines in it, flipping it back and forth.
“Hmmm,” he cleared his throat, “how should I explain this? I’m a happy guy, you know that. I never really had a crisis, a neurosis, or any kind of disease — of the mind or body. We’re one of the few people in the world who were actually made — by scientists mind you — to be happy, content, and satisfied with life. It was engineered into us.”
“Yeah?” Barbie said in the tone of ‘so what?’
Ken clamped down on Barbie’s hand as if she would rip it away as soon as he spoke. He cleared his throat again, but it was just a way of buying time.
“Being dead feels a billion times better than being alive.”
“What?”
“Being dead feels a billion times better than being alive. I can’t even explain or justify it, it just is.”
“This force, it did something to you, you’re different,” she said.
“It made me come back to life when I died, but it didn’t change anything inside my head. I’m trying to channel my experience into words, so that it can be understood by you.”
Barbie yanked at the hand in Ken’s grip, but he held it hard. Barbie started panicking.
“Something is different, you’ve changed. I don’t know what. You speak differently, you act differently, you have a certain inflection in your voice…”
A tear came down her face. A powerful wind grabbed a hold of it and blew it into the desert. The storm was coming closer.
Ken took a step forward, let go of her hand, hugged her tight and whispered in her ear.
“This is going to be confusing and frustrating for you, for I am the only person you have, the only person you know well, I am your life partner. We are destined to be together. We were made for each other. I could spend days, weeks, years explaining what just happened to me, and I still wouldn’t do it justice, not even close. It would be so much easier if you just jumped.”
Barbie started crying, digging her face into Ken’s shoulder.
“I want my old Ken back, I want him back so bad. Please come back…”
“This is what I mean, baby, this is what I mean. If you just jumped-”
At the word “jumped” Barbie’s body jolted as if hit by lightning, she pushed herself free from Ken’s grip, backed up, and assumed the face and posture of a wounded animal. She looked at Ken like he was predator.
“Don’t say that word! Don’t say it! Don’t ever say that word to me! I – will – not – do – it.”
Ken wiped his eyes and held back the tears.
“You have to, darling, you have to, it’s the only thing that’s ever going to bridge that gap between us. I’ll go with you, hold your hand and hug you close all the way to our death. We can walk across the bridge together,” Ken said in a pained voice, not looking like a predator at all.
“This gap, this bridge — is created by the difference between sanity and insanity. I don’t trust you. You’ve gone insane. You are not the man I married. The man that would lie beside me and cuddle me as I died of old age.”
Barbie backed up, tears forming rivers down her face. Her arms hung limply at her side. She stood crooked, to one side, like her spine was bent. The wind blew her from side to side, and she had to parry with her legs not to fall over.
She looked like a marionette at the mercy of the wind.
He put his palms in front of him in a gesture of surrender.
“Okay. I give up. He was right. I admit it. He was right. That was the problem. They were all right. Every single jump our ship observed was a rational decision.”
The sandstorm was only an earshot away. The man tried to stand up, was blown over by the wind, and spoke from his knees.
“The wind is picking up. The sandstorms we have aren’t what you find on Earth. It’s going to hit us hard in only a minute or so.”
“I advise you to get into the ship, I advise you to get into the ship, I advise you to-” the ship said on repeat.
Ken stepped forward.
“Just give me a chance.”
“No,” Barbie backed up.
“I just want to talk to you.”
“You’re a junkie, Ken, you’re scaring me and you changed.”
“Come, we need to get inside the ship,” Ken dashed forward and reached out to grab her — but she pushed him off, turned around and ran, towards the storm, towards the wall of sand, “No! Barbie! We are soulmates! We should grow old together! I love you!” Ken ran after her and was gone. The storm had swallowed them.
The man tried to stand but couldn’t — he was not a physical specimen but a man of normal stature and muscle strength, so he crept back to the ship and rolled inside.
“Can we save them?”
“Negative. I cannot fly accurately in this wind. I would also run the risk of damaging equipment and getting trapped in sand — not an option,” the ship said.
“Then what?”
“We fly to a safe place and wait for the storm to be over. Then we recover them.”
“By the time the storm is over, they’ll be trapped beneath a sheet of sand two miles deep, holding hands.” The man crossed his fingers in a sympathetic gesture.
“That is a possible outcome,” the ship stated.
The man fixated his eyes on the point where Barbie and Ken had disappeared.
“You know… I’m kind of happy they ran off together. It gives them some time to work on their relationship. Without some dirty bastard like me being there to mess it up.”
“Departing now.”
The ship went straight up into the air, and flew to the mountains, away from the storm. They passed over desert, sparse vegetation, a swamp that didn’t seem to end, and arrived at a mountain ridge that went as far as the eye could see.
The man scanned the mountains and found a snow covered mountain peak that looked particularly sharp — it was shaped like a stiletto knife.
“Mind dropping me off on that sharp peak over there?”
“No, sir.”
The man jumped up into the air in joy.
“Sweet! But before I jump, can I record a message in case you make it back to Earth?”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship flew up into the air and opened the door. The man leaned out the door and stared down at the mountains in wonder. A cloud drifted into the ship — he opened his mouth and tasted it.
“Ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Should I speak into a microphone or is it fine anywhere?”
“It’s fine anywhere.”
He was silent for a few seconds.
“You Earthlings got it all wrong, you live life in fear of death because you think that is the punishment. Life is the punishment, death is the reward.”
And then he jumped. The man was smiling again. Because he knew what was coming. Death.
IV
It was ironic that the two best representations of humanity thought that life was a drab.
Oh, but it was… and they were… strong, beautiful, healthy, unhappy people.
SHE — because she lost the love of her life, her soulmate, her life partner; on a spiritual and emotional level.
HE — because nothing could stop him from remembering how wonderful it was to be dead, to be free. It was all the numbers in the world times infinity raised to the power of the universe. It was so incredibly great, that everything he ever felt up to that point ceased to matter. Even her.
And that was how Barbie and Ken discovered hell.
V
Man and Woman, Adam and Eve, Barbie and Ken — yes, they went by many names, and they were the blueprint of everything sound and normal.
But not anymore.
For when they made love, even though they looked like brother and sister, even though they carried the comradery of longtime siblings, they were no longer the norm of humanity in every possible way, they now had character quirks to play around with, they now felt a fierce amount of attraction for each other, and they absolutely adored the opportunity of getting between the sheets and make some good-looking babies.
They had discovered hell, but they had also found heaven.
Tarmrening 