AUTHOR'S NOTES
Readers familiar with my literary ramblings may be surprised to hear that I have published two advanced level Statistics books, both in 1999, along with numerous academic articles. I started self-publishing poetry and prose on my website in 2012 following a variety of previous attempts during my periods of poor health.
Grand Schemes on Qinsatorix is one of two completed novels which are self- published on the Literary Home Page of my website. I took the slightly better written sequel The Grand Oligarchs of Qinsatorix off Kindle about three years ago because of various political implications. I have also self-published a historical novel Reborn on Soutra on another blog. I wrote all four novels after 2011, together with four further attempted novels, each of which I needed to leave half-completed largely because the 'real-life plot' caught up with and confused with the fictional plot. I have not tried very hard to get my fictional work published, and indeed regard my previous style as at times a touch too Chaucerian and lacking in empathy, and rather too A.D.D. intense to the point that it might overwhelm the reader.
All of this has been fodder for various writing groups in Edinburgh, which have often turned out to be a bit too toxic in group psychological terms. I nowadays content myself with attending the Open Door reading group in our Botanic Cottage, and the abilities of some of our well-published authors continue to impress me.
While I have not been a successful author of fiction, I have become, since 2013, a well published historian in my subject (Bayesian Statistics), and I presented detailed verbal and written expert evidence during July 2019 , with Scott Forster, to the Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL. We also started producing a film about Attention Deficitness and Neurodiversity,
Now, early in January 2020, Britain is in insane political turmoil and Australia is burning and facing the possibility of an agonizing Armageddon. Rather than starting another real-life project straightaway, I have therefore decided to embark on yet another attempt at novel writing. Most of my real-life interests and concerns will influence the things I write about. So, here goes!
BRAIN GAMES ON QINSATORIX
by Tom Leonard
CHAPTER 1: LIFE AT ALPHA-OMEGA
Eugenics is a much criticised set of beliefs or practices that aims to selectively improve a population by excluding, marginalising, killing or controlling individuals judged to be inferior, and promoting individuals judged to be superior. The term 'eugenics' derives from the Greek 'eugene' meaning 'well-born'. It was coined by the highly political English polymath Sir Francis Galton in 1883, was been used to justify 'scientific racism' and the brutal treatment of the 'mental defective' for at least the next hundred years.
Pippa Pipette had distinctively bright blue eyes. In September 2712 she was still sweet sixteen and she'd just arrived at the highly regarded Alpha-Omega Academy on the Isle of Caleb in the Archipelago of the Shiners, where she was getting ready to study for her Highers. Pippa slept in Freya Fettes Hall, an ancient building on the Isle of Caleb with four medieval turrets that overlooked Tawi Sound, on a huge, red, oval communal mattress in the third floor dorm. Her pet otter Scatty slept in the broom cupboard, though she sometimes wondered whether he actually existed.
.
Pippa was born in a heat-strengthened, glass test-tube, though without a platinum spoon in her mouth. She wasn't like those 'different' humanoids on the Planet Qinsatorix, in particular the ruling golden-skinned Icarians and the various colourful creatures known collectively as Apollos. According to her in vitro genetic records, she was of a species known as homo sapiens, one of the Devonians whose ancestors had teleported to the Aton star system from the crypt under Exeter Cathedral on Planet Earth a couple of centuries previously. She did not, however, know that many other homo sapiens. Indeed, the identity of her real parents was kept totally secret from her.
Pippa could only imagine what existing on the 'Sceptred Isle' was like, since all sentient life on her mother planet had become extinct during the fireball of AD 2593. However, Icarians and humans had teleported between the sister planets for at least five millennia before that much prophesied Apocalypse. Consequently, the Icarian culture on Qinsatorix has been influenced throughout history by the various rich cultures on Planet Earth, to the point where many of the place names and much of the common language usage would be familiar to any (albeit very rare) European time traveller from centuries before.
It was, for example, the ancient Romans who first extracted titania (titanium dioxide) from ilmenite and the mineral sand rutile, while discovering that they could use their new compound to manufacture white pigment for paint. When the Emperor Claudius sent three Roman senators to Trivoli in AD 51, they successfully traded their technical knowledge about this process for a hundred homo erectus slave-gurus who subsequently teleported to Earth and made important contributions throughout the Roman Empire; indeed a couple of their chemical engineers invented a new plumbing system for latrines and bath houses. The humans rapidly caught on, and their chemical engineers soon developed their time-honoured expertise for unblocking clogged up loos. And the Icarians have been decorating their buildings with white paint ever since.
The renowned Jewish Sephardic explorer Ibrahim ibn Jakob teleported to Qinsatorix in AD 966, at the behest of the Emir of Cordoba; he took six papyrus volumes with him that recorded the key mathematical advances of ancient Moorish culture. When Ibrahim returned to Cordoba with two highly eminent Icarian scientists, they brought unique knowledge with them about humanoid genetics, and about the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. The records of this knowledge were stored in a secret library in a temple in Marrakesh, where they remained undiscovered by the Christians until the mid- nineteenth century.
The alchemists on Planet Earth were then able to describe themselves as experts in 'chemistry', and the human geneticists on the older planet expanded the frontiers of their paltry discipline far beyond anything that could have possibly been envisioned by the 'small fry' Austrian friar Gregor Mendel who'd conned everybody with his infamous pea-breeding experiments. Unfortunately, the evil eugenicists jumped onto the genetics bandwagon, leading to persecution and deaths of many highly intelligent, impoverished and vulnerable people during the centuries that followed.
Such were the cultural exchanges which persisted between the sister planets throughout the ages. During their visits to Planet Earth, the golden-skinned, highly technological Icarians passed themselves off as humans from places like Kazakruritan and Hittite City. Nobody, apart from the ladies of leisure, could spot the difference.
Since she was dark-haired and freckle-less, Pippa regarded herself as of ancient Celtic stock, and she could trace her genetics all the way back to the twenty-first century. She regarded the weak-kneed homo erectus, who inhabited the Land of Qet, as a prototype of her own more advanced species, but she was full of admiration for the strong-chested Neanderthals who populated the upper reaches of the Dnieper valley on Trystonia, the comet-shaped mainland on Qinsatorix.
Pippa's hard working Apollo Wolf adoptive parents lived in Trivoli, the capital of Qinsatorix, also known as the 'City of Lanterns', and once a sister city of Beijing, the erstwhile capital of the People's Republic of East Asia. Although the lovable Apollo Wolves had raised Pippa as a girl, she was in fact one of the special 1.1113 percent of all humanoids who are in physical terms 'of the third gender'. In medical parlance, she was recorded by her Icarian midwife as 'intersex'. However, since Pippa regarded herself as a girl, she was a girl. So that was that!
Gone were the days when intersex humanoids were burnt at the stake as evil monsters (apart from the beautifully attractive ones who were set on pedestals as saints). But the Icarian doctors still treated the intersex Apollo Lizards and Apollo Giraffes abominably at birth. They would decide, quite arbitrarily, whether the Apollo babies should be certified as male or female and would then perform the savage time-honoured surgeries.
The doctors were slightly more sympathetic to human intersex babies, since humans and Icarians are remarkably similar when fully dressed. They'd therefore permitted Pippa to keep all the bits and pieces she was born with, and she'd kept all of them ever since. Her adoptive parents were compulsively super-sympha-empathetic and they tried to explain everything to her in simple terms while she grew up, as a highly studious pupil at Hyde Park Primary. And her 'Sex and Gender' lessons there were taught superlatively by her Home Economics teacher, a socio-politically astute Apollo Triffin with two long noses and four large hands, while the pupils were washing up after the cooking.
Pippa's parents were absolutely thrilled when she passed her eleven plus with flying colours. This miserable mode of selection (which was invented in Moray House, Trivoli by the animal eugenicist and fish breeder Sir Godfrey Burke-Burt and his scatter-brained nephew Cyril in AD 2562) invariably sent about eighty percent of the population to the social scrapheap. However, Pippa got to wear a bright blue uniform and to receive a quality education at Beeslack High.
By the time she was sixteen, Pippa had been awarded the 'Top of the Form' prize for four successive years. But things soon began to go dreadfully wrong. She'd only just completed her Standard Grade exams (in twelve cutting edge subjects) when her eagle-eyed chemistry mistress took her to task. To cut a long story short, the cruel Apollo Tigress paddled Pippa's legs from her ankles to her thighs with an ebony Ouija board. And this was only for smoking queedy-weed with the other hockey players behind the clubhouse. Moreover, the teacher seemed to get a kick out of it.
A more wimpy pupil might well have caved in and promised never to play up ever again. But Pippa wasn't made of that sort of stuff. She was of Celtic stock.
So Pippa went manic and tried to throttle the skimpy harridan with her very large, bare hands. When the teacher began to spew phlegm, Pippa tightened her grip, but she eased up a bit when the tigress's falsies began to rattle in her throat
Pippa was beginning to enjoy herself when two grizzly Apollo Lion rozzers turned up, with a cat o' nine tails and a halter. The policemen dragged the enraged young lady away in the halter, and before she could say, "Pigs smell like greasy, amorated stink bugs,"she'd been stripped to her lace petti-wear and confined for observation in the Imperial Trivoli Hospital for Brain Manipulation on the southern shores of the very salty Lake Osiris. This hedonistic institution, where Lucifer was thought to linger, was known to locals as the Imperial Triv.
After completing a couple of officially approved, eight-hundred-item questionnaires for the blue, sugary-skinned Trinkon invigilators while the one with the jagged teeth was prodding her with a de-ionising confabulator, Pippa was put further to the question while spread-eagled between the pulsating nodes of the Intrubulator. The very next day, she was hauled along the floor of an exceedingly long corridor and thrown headfirst onto a red carpet in a magnificently plush office.
The leading neuron specialist on Qinsatorix, a cantankerous Apollo Goat, was sitting behind a jewel encrusted desk, doubtlessly believing that he was some godhead or other. Looking a touch bored, he glanced at Pippa's notes, and smiled the sort of smile that is closer to a grimace.
"Inject the wretched creature with five hundred millilitres of depixol in the her left depot!" he demanded. The Trinkon orderlies immediately obliged and the needle tore into the bone.
"I'm not a criminal!" wailed Pippa. "I only smoked queedy-weed."
The old goat continued to read Pippa's notes while she was still screaming, before continuing, "Well, Miss Pipette. You're very high on the humanoid scale of intense humanoid diversity, in other words you're on the Lieber-Bieder spectroid. Your responses to our questions were also very peculiar indeed, and at times extremely rude. I therefore have no hesitation in diagnosing you as suffering from Borderline Amadeus Deficiency Syndrome, a very serious genetically inherited biological disease indeed. Whether or not B.A.D.S. is caused by some sort of ridiculously undetectable biochemical imbalance is beside the point. I proscribe a hundred orally-inserted doses of lorazepam. Now jump on her, and go for it, orderlies!"
Before she could even say, 'Neurologists stink like codfish,' Pippa was dragged into the specialist's private 'observation and relaxation' room, summarily shorn of her eye-lashes, nose-pegged, ear-pinned, and chained, rubbery-legged and bleary-eyed, to the corners of an, albeit comfortably white-feathered, Procrustes bed. Then several large lorazepam tablets were forced down her throat using a digestion funnel. Then the specialist came in.
This might appear at first sight to be a horrific way of treating an out-of-hand teenager, but similarly ferocious 'chemical remedies' had been meted out on both of the Sister Planets for over seven hundred years previously, and the same sort of physical abuse for much longer than that. We all remember what happened to the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson n 'Bedlam' in 1774! Therefore, the way the neuron specialist and his acolytes treated Pippa was quite run of the mill.
After a couple of very anxious weeks, Pippa's dutiful Apollo Wolf parents succeeded, against the odds, in negotiating her release from the Imperial Triv by bribing the smelly old neuron specialist with six pentagonal platinum pieces. They were initially thrilled to bits. But then they learnt of a special requirement.The awkward Apollo Goat had signed a 'rendition order' stipulating that Pippa should immediately depart to the Archipelago of the Shiners, and be placed under the guardianship of Dr. Alistair McCull, the Headmaster of Alpha-Omega Academy, and the Director of the much-feared Grigor-Galtius Laboratory for Mind-Body Shrinkiatric Research.
So Pippa wasn't allowed home, or even to see her parents, and she cried her eyes out for several nights in a row. Pippa's parents were scared that the shrinkotherapists in the Grigor-Galtius Laboratory would try to brainwash her and turn her into some sort of zombie, They became increasingly concerned when they learnt that Dr, McCull was also a leading member of the'Shiners', a cult steeped in mystery ( a bit similar to the Quakers, but a touch more half-baked) that had combined forces in previous centuries with the (since exterminated) Frogmasons. Pippa's parents therefore decided to challenge the official rendition order in the High Court of Qinsatorix. However, despite some apparently compelling arguments by Donald Fin-Shark E.C., the Apollo Wolves' case was dismissed out of hand. The highly sensitive creatures were utterly distraught.
Pippa was very upset at the prospect of being controlled by Alistair McCull since he'd been compared in the media with Dr. Bill Private, the man responsible for the Deep Sleep Room under St. Judas's Hospital. McCull was, however, regarded as an eminent mind-body therapist. He'd studied for his advanced doctorate at the Interstellar University of Hippocrates on the Planet Mehmed the Second, where the entire population had curiously calculated IQs exceeding 192. His own IQ was, according to the time honoured Burt-Burke white-collar intelligence test, an impressive 222, though he was, at times, as thick as two planks.
'Mind and body have never been separate," Dr. McCull was fond of pontificating. "The Earthling upstart Renatus Descartes who preached otherwise kept his offal in his head and his brains in his feet."
Where McCull kept his own brains is another matter! He was the long-time headmaster of the Alpha-Omega Academy, and a tough, hard-nosed, persnickety cookie if ever there was one. His husband Knuddy, who taught Qinsatoran Classics at the same high school, was a much more compassionate kettle of fish. Indeed, while Knuddy Skullbanger wasn't an actual fish, he was an Apollo Fish, and resembled a cross between a very slender Neanderthal and a mackerel. His fish-like mouth, gills for breasts, and dorsal, pectoral, and tail fins contrasted with his deep brown eyes, muscular limbs, and large, floppy feet..
When Pippa woke up in Freya-Fettes Hall on the Isle of Caleb on the second Thursday of September 2712, her pet otter Scatty was sitting on her chest and her dozen or so assorted smelly bedfellows were still in their ankle-length night shirts. They included eleven assorted Qinsatorans of various genders and ethnicities, and a metallic, six-limbed Psychlops from the Planet Gallium. The Psychlops sometimes went rigid for hours on end because of his unfortunate muscular skeletal difficulties. When he began to stir, Pippa bounced off the communal mattress, and rushed to the loo.
A blue, sugary skinned Trinkon in the Control Room was closely observing Pippa's every move on the Micro-Macro Screen. He recorded an S for Satisfactory by her name in the log.
Many of the students at the Alpha-Omega Academy were "shrinkiatric guinea-pigs' which meant that they received their, highly intense, mind-body treatment in the Grigor-Galtius Laboratory. Such students were kept under constant surveillance by the mean and tricky Trinkon overseers, who were expected to report any hint of a misdemeanour to Dr.Alistair McCull. Any hint of sex or the even the mildest form of hand relief (a politically correct way of describing self-gratification) was strictly prohibited, on pain of a non-stop ten mile run around the lofty, windswept clifftops of the Isle of Caleb, and lentils, cabbage, and cod liver tea for the next seven breakfasts. And any impudence to a teacher or official 'minder' meant a psychologically challenging trip to the Corrections and Rehabilitation Unit, where the talking tigers ruled the roost.
Pippa liked to sit on the austere, off-white lavatory bowl for as long as she could get away with. That morning, Pippa day-dreamed about memories from her childhood, and during her dreams numerous pictorial images flashed in front of her. These were not, of course, psychoses in any shape or form, but rather colourful thoughts which persisted in bouncing around her head.
Pippa dreamt about the pet mice who she took to breed with the big brown mouse which Sven kept next door in the hutch under the crab apple tree. Not to forget the very first time she kissed Sven and the way he quivered in her sturdy arms. She couldn't quite remember whether this was during one of the sherry and trifle parties which her parents threw for all those interminable relatives on Christmas Eve, but she vividly recalled her half-stoned Uncle Aubrey spilling his drink over Auntie Mavis's lap and cousin Hunk peeing all over the Mohawk rug.
Then Pippa saw vivid pictures of her very first otter, Rotor, breaking a leg when he was hit by an omnibus, and her strolls with her shaggy-haired great granny along the Water of Kleeth. That was just before her dear mother ran out of milk ----Yes, fond memories indeed.
And then Pippa genuinely thought that she saw her Apollo Wolf mother running screaming down the street. But just as her mother caught up with the milk lady, the gong chimed three times for breakfast in the Chevenix-Trench Room.
Unfortunately, all the bacon had been gobbled up by the time Pippa arrived in the breakfast room, and she was left, once more time, with the choice of burnt toast and Quaker Oats. So she polished off her meagre bowlful of salted oats, took a sip of lukewarm tea, howled 'Quakers can't tell their oats from poo-beans', and hurried across the quadrangle for her classes in Patrocles Hall. She was soon wishing that she'd hidden on her favourite top floor futon for a snooze-in
There followed an hour of Celestial Mathematics and two very boring hours of Qinsatoran Classics in Patrocles Hall. Pippa felt thoroughly brassed off, and she spent most of the time making paper darts and chucking them into her desk.
.
When the Cockatoo Clock struck noon, Dr. Knuddy Skullbanger stopped talking in mid-stanza while reciting the horribly lengthy Odyssey of Agrevius. Upon completing the line, 'So Sporius to his foul and painful fate did go and all was sickening woe', Knuddy scratched his gills and told the students attending his Classics class to scarper off to lunch.
Pippa felt very sorry for Sporius, since he was changed, while still a youth, into a woman, very brutally and against his will, solely for the gratification of the beastly Emperor Agrevius the Fourth. But when Pippa's pet otter leapt into her arms she forgot what she'd been feeling sorry about.
When her thoughts returned to the reality of the moment, Pippa packed her satchel, took a furtive, but encouraging, glance at her chums Slim and Dreyfus, and headed for the Cymbeline Grotto Dining Hall, long since named after Dame Cymbeline Grotto, the very first headmistress of Alpha-Omega, and a highly eminent humanoid eugenicist, who believed that 'if the physically and mentally defectives go then superior genes will flow'. With this mentality in mind, Dame Grotto founded the Eugenics Society of Qinsatorix in AD 2472, and served as its president for the following four years while working in the Humanoid Genetics and Anthropology Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbour.
Another of Dame Grotto's quotes, 'Starve the degenerates and improve the species', was
enormously influential during the liquidation of the highly cultured Snipper Snapper creatures in the Eastern deserts, and long thereafter.
Pippa was thinking about Dame Grotto's quotes when she sat down, and she didn't feel like eating in the frigging place. After further reflection, Pippa put her yellowy-green cheese sandwich into the side pocket of her regulation light blue tunic, and headed for the beach.
Pippa was asking the Ferry Lady how much it would cost to take her to the Garden of the Forbidden Apples, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw her buddies Slim and Dreyfus slinking towards her across the pebbles.
Aren't I the crafty one? enthused Pippa. Or am I in the middle of a psychosis? They seem to have followed me just as I imagined they would. Therefore this is all, in all likelihood, part of reality.
'Are you on some sort of trip?' inquired Slim with a playful smirk. "Unfortunately we've run out of acid."
"We're trapped here," complained Pippa. "The Ferry Lady wants to charge me a whole penny. That's so extortionate!".
"In that case, why don't we hang out under the Beelzebub tree?" suggested Dreyfus, with a flourish of the wobbly silver horn which emerged from the roof of his perfectly symmetric skull.
"Good idea," replied Pippa. "We can whisper sweet nothings to each other. Come along, Scatty!"
"Scatty, who's Scatty?" asked Slim, in surprise, but Pippa's pet otter was nowhere to be seen.
"She was there a moment ago," insisted Pippa. "She isn't a figment of my imagination, No, she isn't!"
Slim was an occasionally demure, ginger-haired Icarian from Angervast, the largest city on the Inner Moon, who'd studied on the Isle of Caleb ever since he was sent, in arm and leg constraints, to Alpha Prep at the tender age of eleven. In contrast, Dreyfus was a handsome, horsey-faced Apollo unicorn from the City of Tyre-on-the-Tiber, whose upper middle class parents were funding his sixth form studies at Alpha-Omega following his brilliant straight A's in fourteen subjects at standard grade.
. Since all three pupils were wearing their regulation light blue tunics and tight, long white hosiery, they looked remarkably similar in build if not in facial appearance. Indeed, Slim's eyes were green and Dreyfus's were black, while Pippa sometimes wondered whether hers were the brightest blue eyes on the planet.
Maybe we are three in one in some sort of mystical sense, or possibly even one in three, mused Pippa, while they were settling down together in the shrubbery under the weeping willow tree. She thought that the Beelzebub tree's mossy roots were symbolic of something or other, but she couldn't decide what. They were (according to Pippa's perception)infested with crimson star-shaped insects called festoonettes (which are, in aggregate, more intelligent than any humanoid who has ever existed)
"And which cl-classes are you planning to attend this afternoon, Miss P-Pipette?" stammered Slim, slurping his not-so-fizzy soda.
Pippa grinned one of her more encouraging grins."I'm attending Dr. McCull's two classes on Medical Statistics, Slim. The first is all about subjective probability, and the second is about how to use it, together with something even sillier called Bayes' Theorem, to decide whether the client, or guinea pig or whatever, is off his flaming rocker."
Slim rubbed his prawn-like eyebrows, and fluttered his ginger eyelashes. "That'll be my scene too," he mumbled.
Dreyfus flexed his muscular biceps and pursed his lips."I'm not attending any classes this afternoon, cos I'm playing rugby at Saint Sebastian's."
Slim gave Dreyfus a funny look, and chuckled."I don't envy you the icy cold shower afterwards. It'll be enough to freeze your knackers off."
Dreyfus crushed a couple of lively festoonettes with his thumb and turned a deep shade of green.
"I don't think I'll enjoy it anyway," he moaned. "The other blokes will probably laugh at my quimmy. It's in such a stupid place. You Icarians are so lucky, Slim. I don't even have an orchadeus. Or even one of those lovely squeegy-squeegies!"
It takes all sorts, mused Pippa, trying hard not to snigger. But this only serves to increase the karma between the three of us. A trans Apollo Unicorn man in our midst, no less!
"I love the way you walk, Dreyfus," she blurted, straight out of her subconscious, "though I don't quite know which way to stalk."
At that, Dreyfus suddenly sobbed, flexed his tiny fingers, and buried his face in his grubby, hoof-shaped hands.
"Perchance you'll be husband and wife one day," suggested Slim, with a half-suppressed snigger.
"I do hope I'm not intruding," squawked Dr. Knuddy Skullbanger, marching up and taking a snipshot, "but I'm really most impressed.This sounds like a magnificent first rehearsal for a ridiculously zany play."
Pippa felt very confused and brain-fogged by the entire situation.
"I hope you'll attend our all-intriguing First Night, since you're, in all probability, in for a big surprise, " she blurted, before wondering whether she'd said something nonsensical.
Slim felt a bit mesmerised at that. "I love the way the tactless words pour out of your feckin head, Pippa darling. Perchance you have ADHD like my three sisters."
"Stop gas-lighting me!" shrieked Pippa. "You're one big bully,"
Slim wriggled his nose, and smiled. "But we're family, darling, I'm your big brother and Dreyfus is your little sister."
"I have my own family. They're in the City of Lanterns, waiting to visit me,"
"Hmmmm---I wouldn't bet on that for one moment. I was brought to the Isle of Caleb when I failed the IQ test on my eleven plus, and I haven't been allowed to see my real family since."
"No!!!!!! I'm sure I'll see my Mummy and big bad Daddy, and all my Apollo Wolf brothers and sisters again soon. Yes, I'm sure I will!"
While his thoughts of his own family were throbbing through his head, Slim felt horses' hooves pounding around the inside of his skull, and realised that he was blanking something of note, something immensely traumatic, out of his memory. He therefore struggled for words, before stammering. "M-maybe McCull and his cronies are sort of g-grooming us. The Shiners are even w-weirder than those confounded Toadmasons."
"Those tossers won't groom me!"retorted Pippa. "Now why don't we kiss each other and calm down? Kissing usually does the trick for me."
Suddenly and without warning, Slim grimaced like a ghoulish helldinger and flew into a borderline neurotic-psychotic fit. "Mother, Father, Grandmama! Return to me before I impale myself on the Sword of Everlasting Torture of the Mind. Mummy, Daddy, Granny! Don't leave ME to die. But are you still alive, Mother? Mother! Mother! Mother! Where the feck are you, Mother?"
That put Pippa on edge. Wow! He must be the victim of some sort of childhood trauma, she thought. I do hope it isn't inter-generational.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg!" wailed Dreyfus.
"And I was beginning to think that you were all much saner than the rest of us," complained Dr. Knuddy Skullbanger, with a frown and a grimace, as he headed for the ferry boat to Eden.
Pippa, feeling confused and upset, retreated in haste to Grotto Hall, where several of the residents were enjoying high tea. After bitterly complaining to the Apollo Owl warden about the broken tele-hologram in the lounge, she polished off two fake cream buns when she thought that nobody was looking. But while she trying hard not to listen to a verbally delinquent Apollo Frog from the Southern Swamps, two Snazi-esque Trinkon overseers strode up, out of the blue, and clicked their metallic heels.
"We're here to take you to the Grigor-Galtius Laboratory, Miss Pipette," announced the squat overseer, with a stiff nod and a stern blink. "So don't even think about giving us any more of your impudent shit!"
"It's for your first in depth mind-body examination, you see," added the taller overseer, with a grin. "Dr. McCull wishes to delve further into what makes you really tick."
Slim emerged like a troll stalker from behind a marble statue of 'The Death Struggle of Laocoon and his three Trojan daughters ', looking agitated and concerned,
"Please be kind to her," he shrieked , as they marched her away.
"Don't worry about her," retorted the squat overseer, with a cruel smirk. "You're next."
The tall overseer laughed. "And you're in for a surprisingly surprising surprise, my dearest darling beastie."
"Surprise, surprise!" gurgled the squat imbecile, with a leer. "It will surprise the enzymes that lurch within him."
THE GRIGOR-GALTIUS LABORATORY
After a gruelling couple of hours of preliminary tests in a cavern deep inside Kalton Hill, Pippa was marched down an ornate staircase and into the much-celebrated Grigor-Galtius Lab, wearing only a spotlessly white towel wrapped tightly around her muscular waist. She and her two overseers were met by the Head Yin, a Trinkon who stood fully a foot taller than the rest.
"This is Miss Pippa Pipette, Sire," announced the squat overseer, handing the Head Yin a thick file. "She's transgender, from third gender to female that is, and of British ethnic stock."
The Head Yin gave Pippa a curious stare.
"How appropriate," he said, with a chuckle. "Dr. McCull genuinely thinks that he's of Scottish descent, though he isn't, in reality, human at all. He likes to identify with the British psych morons of bygone eras, and he simply worships the psych-eugenicists Ewen Cameron and Alfred Tredgold, not to forget Lionel Penrose and all his crap about biological defect. McCull's got them on the brain!"
The taller overseer grinned. "He talks about Sir Francis bloody Galton in his sleep, Sire."
"Thank goodness that we've moved way beyond all of that barbaric black magic, Slutch. The psych morons used to slowly poison their very own patients to malignant deaths, would you believe? And those who objected really got it in the neck."
"In the butt, as I remember," retorted Pippa, a touch insolently.
The taller overseer grinned, a touch inanely. "We haven't detected an iota of what that Penrose jerk called schizophrenia in this one, Sire. Yet."
"In particular, her Penrose-Burt Schizo-IQ tests have never even suggested a glimmer of mental deficiency or feeble mindedness,"added the squat one.
"Good! Nothing hereditary then?"
"Derrr---nope."
"Excellent! But we should check for calcification of her pineal gland, just to make sure the wench isn't a closet schizo. I'll ask one of the nurses to fetch an extra-thin Jay-spot trepanner from Equipment and Supplies. It'll be perfectly painless."
"But I can see through my Third Eye," blurted Pippa. "It reveals the Ultimate Truth to me. We are all made of completely random electrons!"
The Head Yin narrowed his gaze. "We can only thank Yahweh and the Prophet Isa that we got you here in the nick of time then, darling. There's hope for you yet."
Pippa immediately went a bit manic, and had to be frog-marched along the entire length of the Grigor-Galtius Lab, much to the consternation of the beetles and roaches who fled in dismay
.On either side of the central corridor, teams of Trinkette nurses were busily testing and treating their patients, many of whom were strapped to some very strange-looking pieces of neuro-scientific equipment. Some of the patients were Alpha-Omega pupils, while others had been brought over in tightly-fitting manacles from the enormous Carperberry Asylum on the Isle of Flute.
A pansexual pelimode from Southern Artica with postprandial personality disorder had been injected with a purple dye, and her head and beak inserted into an electron scanner, Her entire blood system was displayed in a three-dimensional hologram, and her neuron map on a holo-neurosynthesiser. Whenever she was asked a question, the hologram winced and her neurons went haywire.
An utterly crazy Apollo horse from Zamara was being subjected to a none-too-well-received frigmoidoscopy while being made to dance in ever increasing circles, thus causing much merriment and laughter among the Trinkette nurses in attendance.
When Pippa saw a paranoid schizophrenic sex criminal in leg irons getting his comeuppance on a transfigurating globuliser, she felt physically sick. I hope they don't treat me like a criminal, she agonised.
When she saw a beautiful young lady lying unconscious on a couch, with a griffin straddling her chest, and a horse neighing at her feet, Pippa wondered whether she was in the Deep Sleep Room under St. Judas's Hospital.
As the huge portrait of Hippocrates at the far end of the laboratory came into sight, Pippa was aghast to see a hospital trolley rushing towards them. When it whooshed by to her left, Pippa thought she saw a fleeting picture of a metallic Psychlops lying on top, with a long silver sword stuck vertically into his bulbous single eye. I must be borderline psychotic spasmodic! she concluded, in utter dismay.
When another trolley rushed by to Pippa's right, she thought she caught a fleeting image of a pink baby elephantus with a steel invictulator protuding from its chest. Pippa almost went into meltdown.
When the Head Yin cuffed Pippa to the piano-shaped mahogany desk at the end of the lab, Dr. Alistair McCull seemed to be in a deep trance. And when Pippa saw his fixated eyes staring into space, she wondered whether he was a caring Icarian, or a wicked demon from the fiery depths.
The Head Yin coughed politely, and McCull stirred himself, only to look as confused as a demented orang-utan on heat.
"Why it's my darling Achilles!" blurted McCull, through the fog. "You seemed a bit depressed when I last saw you. Did the completely voluntary chastisement therapy do the trick?"
"What an easy peasy mistake to make, Herr Doctor!" responded the Head Yin, handing McCull a thick folder. "Achilles and Pippa are virtual look-alikes, though their complexions are a bit different. This is Miss Pippa Pipette and she's suffering from Post-Traumatic and Highly Compulsive Manic Infusion, but that's only according to our preliminary diagnosis. The previous arsehole thought that she had B.A.D.S., but he's a completely twisted nutcase himself."
"But what happened to my dear Achilles?" moaned McCull, looking irritated.
"He's much less depressed following his outstanding treatment, Herr Doctor, though he's still recovering from the neatly splintered bone in his ankle. He really is a very plucky ducky! We didn't even have to put him through our beastly vertebrae adjustment routine, and his dark green skin is returning to its natural colour already."
McCull promptly acquired a fresh aura. He looked God-like. "Excellent! I'm so happy for him."
McCull quickly went as silent a stealth owl, and flipped through several pages of Pippa's folder blinking furiously. When he reached page 7, he peered at Pippa as if through a dope-ridden haze, looked ever more befuddled, and said, "So young fella. That B.A.D.S. diagnosis was completely up the spout. How does it feel to be manically infused?"
"I'm a girl!" protested Pippa, "and I'm NOT manically infused. I simply get a bit hysterical at times, as girls do."
"Really Pippykins! It's our job to determine the diagnoses, and what you think has absolutely nothing to do with it. According to your records, your Trinkon overseers have observed you looking a teeny weeny bit tense during your conversations. One of them even noticed you tangentialising onto a ridiculously extraneous topic, something to do with Christopher Robin as I remember, and you were heard blurting nonsense on at least three separate occasions. You sounded like the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he's trying to balance his Budget."
"So what? I'm simply a bit of an extrovert, and I come up with all sorts of interesting ideas and try to share them."
"A feeble excuse! It's very clear to me that you're suffering from hyperkinetic brain damage, and another symptom of that is Tredgold manic infusion. So that's my diagnosis, and you're stuck with it for the foreseeable future, and indeed for ever and anon."
"I want a second opinion! I'm not brain damaged."
"Sheer impudence! How dare you contradict your superiors! I learnt my stuff from Professor
Harry McLaughlin, the eight-hundred-year-old time-stretcher at the Heidelberg Institute of Technology, and I'm sure that he would concur with all of my modes of diagnosis and treatment, every single God-dammed one of them."
"But---."
"Shut the feck up, you daft wee lass! Now hyperkinetic brain damage is, in my, and Harry's, esteemed opinion, caused by dysfunctionality of the organs. So we'll perform multiple key hole surgeries to see if you need any transplants."
"No!!!! My organs have absolutely nothing to do with my grey matter."
"Your entire body is part and parcel of your damaged brain, you silly fool. Don't worry! It won't hurt. We'll coat your tender skin with freezing Sting Sting lotion while we're getting ready to roll."
"No!!!! Not that!"
"Stretch her limbs out on the spherical rotating frame, Trinks! Torsion level 10, at sixty degrees to the horizontal, and with her ears clipped to the triangulator. And please remember to observe and record her neuropsychological reactions when I insert the Putin incisors into her not-so-delicate anatomy."
The Head Yin looked fit to grovel. "No problem at all, Herr Doctor. And you'll be glad to hear that ten new human kidneys have arrived from the convict colony in the Southern Swamps. I'll take one out of the freezer just in case we need it, and a second for good measure."
"Good idea! If we don't need the second one, we'll fry it for the lab monkeys for breakfast."
"Don't give it to the monkeys!" shrieked Pippa, "My otter Scatty could do with a new kidney."
"You should count yourself lucky, young lady," added the Head Yin. "A kidney transplant doesn't compare with the sorts of psycho-surgeries that have been performed throughout the Red Trojan and Milky Way Universes during the last six centuries or so. If we removed your spleen, then we'd need to hang you upside down over our gut-cutter."
At that very moment, Pippa's ginger-haired, golden-skinned Icarian classmate Slim appeared out of the blue. He was cuffed to two growling Apollo Lion orderlies, and looked as traumatized and confused as a koala bear escaping from a blazing forest of fire. Nevertheless, one of the Trinkette nurses went into a tizz at the sight of his exotically beautiful orchadeus, and the others simply gawped.
"Not that rascal Slim Quick again!" complained Dr. Alistair McCull. "Just look at him flaunting himself to all and sundry! I think that he's a narcissistic psychopath."
"The red hot recodifier maybe, Herr Doctor?" suggested the Head Yin. "It would sort out his blatant deviosity, and we could put him into an induced coma afterwards."
"I'm not going into any fucking coma for you ponces!" howled Slim.
McCull narrowed his eyes. "There's no chance of that, Mr. Quick. It's the electron-deconfabulating capsule for you. Please remember to shave off his God-dammed hair before you close the lid, Trinkettes. We wouldn't want to hurt the fleas. I'll be over in a while to flick the switches."
"No!!!! Not my lovely hair!" wailed Slim, as they dragged him towards the Jadrok Collider,
"How utterly ingenious, Herr Doctor," exclaimed the Head Yin, amidst generous applause. "You make me proud to think that I, too, am a Qinsatoran."
"It's all part of my Grand Scheme," purred McCull. "We'll take the puppy dogs with us to the Lismore Retreat, and turn them into a pair of poodles."
Please click here for
CHAPTER 2: THE LISMORE RETREAT
CHAPTER 3: THE HOTEL DE WASH
CHAPTER 4: THE SHINERS REACH A CONSENSUS
CHAPTER 5: JOURNEY TO THE APE SWAN'S NEST
CHAPTER 6: INTRIGUE ON LAKE SPECTRUM
CHAPTER 7: THE THREE WISE OLD COUNTS STICK
THEIR OAR IN
CHAPTER 8: A CHILD IS BORN
"
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