by Tom Blitzenbaum, February, 2k24
I was an instant hit with the Big Boys. Of course, I’m talking about the two fascinating species of Paleolithic mega men and women that Doctor Johnny Appleweed had unearthed, literally, in his ongoing quest across the sines (not a typo) of time for the potent but elusive strains of cannabis extraordinarus, especially those containing the cannabinoid Delta 500 Paradisus.
I know you’re probably thinking what all this has to do with me and virgin queens and all, but let me give you a little background before we talk about Jane Halloway, Little Doe, and me, good old Friar Huck, Tom Sawyer’s sidekick all grown up if you can believe that.
I dropped the Finn from my moniker immediately after my resurrection at Restoration Point. I never hesitated to amputate that abominable appendage of Pap’s, and the schadenfreude of ending the Finn line and leaving it in Hell where it belongs still gives me a pleasant rush of satisfaction to this day. Sometimes a fella just has to make up his own karma for his own self-respect if you know what I mean.
I don’t mind (much) when my sentient intimates persist in calling me Huckleberry. Like Kalahari Gemini does to get my full attention when she thinks I’m crossing some social line or when I’m in actual danger, spiritually or physically. Y’all might bitch and moan about your Big Brother troubles but believe me. A mobile AI Big Sister who has appointed herself as your personal guardian angel can be a big pain in the ass.
I’ll pay for that later, I suppose. But let’s get back to my tale. Can’t digress too much just because Blitzenbaum is getting paid by the word.
Appleweed’s Temporarily Captive Neandies
Anyhow, oh I guess it was about a decade ago now, that our man Applweed offloaded the hairy Big Foot-looking specimens he’d unwittingly caught in his hastily filtered, broad scanning BMUS net (along with the targeted cannabis crop they’d cultivated) on the south forty at his Dame Esther’s North Virginia spread.
When the buds bloomed down there at the scrubbiest, rockiest parts of Esther’s domain a tsunami of terraforming paradise spontaneously erupted and bloomed with them. It was almost like nature’s version of a pre-programmed godrod kit, only instead of an instant building, you got an instantaneous generation of acres and acres of tropical valleys and fertile hills.
But one species’ 40 acres of paradise is another’s 40-acre prison, as we were about to find out.
A few of the older Neandies remained in their paradise bubble in Dame Esther’s domain, too old to resist living out their days on this impromptu “reservation” and lacking the energy to tackle brave new worlds. These old lions and their harems contented themselves with defending their crops and dismantling any harvesting equipment that Dame Esther sent in to monetize on her allotment of otherwise useless land.
But as for the young, virile, and adventurous of the Neandie clan? They’d long since vanished into the wilderness. Not long after, their occasional dabblings with humanity made them legends on more than one Paleo planet in the Armstrong Cascade parallels. Seems those humongous heads of theirs had plenty of extra brain space evolved for inherent quantum teleportation. Judging by the not-so-rare sasquatch sighting reports all across the Armstrong Cascades, Weed’s shanghaied Neandies could hop from paradise to paradise like monkeys hopping from tree to tree.
Important Warning: If you happen to encounter a nomadic Neandie in your own wilderness excursions whatever you do don’t fall for those benevolent ape expressions. Especially if you appear to be a Cromagnon descendant, their natural enemies and competitors. And never send your bots out for a remote look or they’ll likely send them back in pieces. If you do manage to penetrate their domain (about a 50 square mile radius of wherever they happen to be) you will likely end up roasting on a spit for the next Neandie feast, fulfilling the two-fold purpose of filling hungry omnivorous bellies while also ensuring that you’ll never tell your Big Foot encounter story to anyone.
Megasapiens Giganticus?
Now we were back to observe another intriguing species of mega humans in their natural habitat, discovered on the same paradisical Paleo-era planet. Both the Howard Foundation and the EMAHO bunch had been pinging the planet since Weed’s discovery. The general analysis of data from those cost-efficient nanoprobe missions concluded that Weed’s captured clan was only the Neanderthal parallel in this timeline. They did NOT have the planet to themselves. Like so many other Paleo Earth eras these sasquatch look-alikes cohabitated with the more familiar and far less brutish Cro Magnon version of the species.
In other words us…but bigger.
Way bigger. Megasapiens, ubersapiens, sapiens giganticus, take your pick. Nothing official yet on their agreed-upon anthropological classification, that’s Jane’s problem, but you get the picture.
The Megs were beautiful in proportion to their enormous scale. They were possessed of a classic Greek-like beauty, with a dash of Nordic muscle and the nobility of the 7-foot Watusi tribe. The enormous females first impressed me as walking Venuses and the virile bucks like Adonis. They called to mind Genesis of Yah’s first Beta run of the universe, those enigmatic giants, the sons of God who came down for Earth’s beautiful women, and this race was their offspring.
In any case, both bucks and does were the diametric opposite of Weed’s AWOL Neander-hair-balls with the boat-sized feet. And, thank Yah they regarded Jane and I as merely smaller versions of themselves, so we didn’t have to worry about becoming the main course.
But we did have to worry about becoming their gods.
____________________________________________________________________________
Paleolithic phase-lagged Earths are quite a leap for even the most technically advanced, but Weed’s computer was allegedly equipped with DVS. Weed’s Divine Guidance System makes quantum leaps across billions of minutely out-of-phase time-space waves as easy and natural as a Calaveras County frog going from one smooth rock to another across a creek without getting its feet wet.
And since Weed and his quantum gadgetry on the Jilly R were responsible for rescuing me from the clutches of the temptress Lucy Ferguson after my augenblitz from Twain’s desk drawer to Blitz’s sentient Dell computer, I fully trusted the brilliant botanist as captain of the yacht in orbit above me.
Unlike good Jane on the other side of the mountain with the females of the tribe, I fully adhere to the prophet Heinlein’s credo that TANSTAAFL always applies. Hence my passage on a private luxury yacht like the Jilly Rogers was far from a free lunch.
What the uber-frugal Howard crowd never seemed to learn is the lesson that you get what you pay for. Or, as the widow would correct, Yah bless her soul, ‘that for which you pay’. Whatever. As a result, our Good Jane had to trek 3 weeks through a lush, thick tropical jungle due to obsolete parachute steering difficulties that landed her 30 or 40 miles off target. WW2 surplus if I know Drysdale, junk that was most likely acquired from the lowest bidder.
Poor Jane. We were now 3 weeks behind schedule and had yet to make contact with each other, as the mega sapiens here were segregated by sex, and Jane was to observe and possibly make first contact with the village ladies while I of the Omega collar brought brothership and first contact to the unruly bachelor herds usually exiled to the wilds.
Well, except for the estrus mating season that seems to have commenced already. But more on that later.
Doc Weed’s AI ship, the private n-space yacht Jilly Rogers, was not the lowest bidder for my EMAHO mission. My old pal Weed always had the highest bootlegged tech available from the Star Truk black market that thrived on his home base Earth, the planet APE for “All Pirated Earth”.
There, pilfered characters (like me!) are resurrected, recomposed, and released. The belief on APE is that everything in the universe is a derived product and therefore all beings, businesses, and belongings are up for grabs.
So, while my good friend an eminent field anthropologist Jane Halloway had to parachute down to the Paleolithic planet risking life and limb in the effort, good Friar Huck, me, beamed down in style right smack in the middle of the mega men’s bachelor herd.
Weed’s BMUS gadget worked just fine, though in this case, the Scotty brand transporter from the Star Truk smugglers had just beamed me down rather than up. But you get the picture unless your timeline has been bound behind the censorship of the Ironic Curtain or you’ve been living off-grid under a rock since the 1970s.
Friar Huck: The Man From EMAHO
In this here episode, the one that you’re trying to read about now, pardon my 420 digressions, I was designated as an Extraordinary Minister Anthropologist Human Observer. Let me be so bold as to give you an idea of how the weird EMAHO code from Omega’s enigmatic Fathernet works.
The anagram method is used to relay backspace insert commands from the Omega Point to the guys and gals at Restoration Point circa 2126. Something about information theory and quantum teleportation communication is involved but I’m just a poor country preacher by nature with an anthropological bent as my avocation, so don’t ask me about the math.
The techs at Restoration Point, Gomer, and Goober, then interpret and relay the decoded EMAHO commands down the Omega Stream to us lowly characters who may or may not have spent decades in a weird, unedited Tripod website Limbo thanks to the crappy on-again-off-again work ethic of our Creator.
According to our mission plan, avid birdwatcher and mission teammate Jane was planning to execute her dream treehouse complete with bath, bidet, and cool one-way visibility blinds for observing the Big Girls at work and play. My domestic tastes aren’t that simple since I finally found myself grown up after centuries of nearly homeless adolescence, so I used my own more generous Emaho-funded godrod quota to erect a manly A-frame lodge.
The Big Boys of the megasapien race quickly turned my spacious 3-story quarters into the community man-cave, once they caught on to billiards, bowling, and basketball.
Jilly’s superb DVS integrated with the precision of her BMUS app had placed me precisely in the center point of the ritual circle where the bachelor herd was busy issuing the loud and bawdy mating call ritual in response to the hormonal signals that announced that the eagerly awaited mating season had begun.
In my long-delayed manhood, I’ve grown to a respectable 6’2”. But I was still a dwarfed, out-of-scale presence when I made my sparkling First Contact BMUS appearance, materializing amidst the testosterone-fogged feral minds of those frustrated bachelors, who immediately dropped to their big knees and made me their god.
Talk about moving up in the worlds!
As the mega sapiens extended estrus mating season approached with the full moon, the big unruly bachelors, the most dominant Alphas nearing 8 feet tall began to issue loud mating calls across the jungle. My state-of-the-art companion, the sentient and loveable AI Kal Gemini 77.0 had no trouble at all translating the grunt and gesture language that contained quite an elaborate vocabulary. Not surprising considering the enormous size of the average mega sapiens’ cerebrum, but this time of year sex was all that occupied their fertile minds, so that wasn’t the only enormous part of their Adonis-invoking anatomies.
“Huck, honey, you need to watch your ass. Literally.” boised the computer Kal Gem via ocular implant, the model she’d picked for me that had no ‘off’ switch.
“My Big Boys are getting a bit feisty aren’t they?” I replied with a chuckle, as two juvenile pubescent mega boys crossed swords, as it were, right there on the front lawn of my lodge. “Nothing new under the sun K Gem. Just like old Joe Sapiens in that respect. Gay by convenience, like sailors on an all-male ship, Spartans in an all-male army, or prisoners in Draconian institutions all over the universes sadly deprived of conjugal visitation. But yes, KG, I will indeed heed your wise counsel and “watch my ass’. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but in this case, somebody could get hurt.”
A piercing Tarzan-like call was like flute music to a cobra charmer when it filled the air with mega femme music to the bachelor ears so eagerly waiting for a response to their rutting yahoos, that so far hadn’t gotten much results. The Big Boys dropped whatever they were doing as their sirens called, bowling and basketballs rolling around neglected and forgotten now.
My A-frame lodge emptied quickly when the Adonis male I affectionately called Big Head donned his peacock-colored wardrobe and stormed down the mountain trail toward the irresistible call. The other mega bucks followed his lead, and I found myself in blissful solitude for the first time in 3 weeks.
And that was the problem. Jane should have been able to establish a Kal Gal link to me by now but I hadn’t gotten a single ping back. With Jilly’s 66G wifi tech we both should have been in immediate communication from day one, but I suspect that again the Drysdale-dominated Foundation had probably stuck poor Jane with an obsolete 21st-century KG model. So while I could communicate across n-space effortlessly, Jane was stuck with the technical equivalent of 2 cans with a string. Well maybe not that bad, but easily like 9-volt walkie-talkies in a quantum communication world.
The mating music and drums had begun and the bachelor herd was now far down the trail ahead of me. At nearly 8 feet tall I had a hard time keeping up with them even when they were walking softly with enormous strides and carrying big sticks on the hunting forays I’d tagged along on. But why walk when you can beam from point to point without breaking a sweat?
I had time to kill before the inevitable union of the tribe, so I filled my everpresent corn cob pipe with Weed’s best cannablend and headed to the media den to see if the boys had used up all the movie tokens on my Pentonhouse channel in the man cave. Of course, they had, so I took my Extraordinarus Paradisus pouch and pipe out to the deck where as it turned out I was no longer alone after all.
The Lolita Doe
She peeked at me timidly from the tropical jungle, near the border where my big boys had manicured my lawn for baseball and other manly diversions I’d introduced to keep them busy and blow off some steam as they waited for the annual mating season to heat up.
The young megasapien doe was probably experiencing her first heat. But even at 6 feet tall I could see that although this here girl might be aroused by ritual and the potent pheromone stream that permeated the mountain air, the stark naked youngster certainly wasn’t ripe yet. Flat as a board, a carpenter’s dream as old Tom Sawyer might say.
She wore the elaborate braids that I was to discover later were the signal to the rambunctious bachelors that she was still off limits and taboo for mating purposes.
“Yo there girl!” I waved a welcome, and Kal Gem cooperatively broadcast the audio grunts that the pubescent doe could understand. “Come sit with me and enjoy my hospitality!” Echoes of forbidden fruit rang alarms in my mind, such as C.S. Lewis’s wise advice that sometimes you just have to leave some girls alone.
I had already named the sprite young doe “Lolita” in my head, but stoned as I was on Weed’s best Paradisus, and having endured 3 weeks of celibacy, it was more like mental foreplay than an inhibiting moral alarm. As they say around this universe, forbidden fruit is often the tastiest and most desired with a bit of taboo pepper to spice things up.
“Really FRIAR?” exclaimed Kal Gem, always standing by via my Ramazon Ekko implant. That was the gadget she used to nag…er, maintain constant contact with me whether I wanted her to or not. “You sir, are on dangerous ground here. You’ve just invited her into your domain.”
Leave a Reply