100ThemeChallenge – Light

How that monkey got ahold of that million candle power spotlight, I don’t think we’ll ever know, but I had to tell the court something.

“Y’see, your honor,” I began, clearing my throat, “it all started back when I was in my senior year at Time Warner University,” — I inwardly prayed that name-dropping a prestigious college would score me points with the mostly affluent jury — “back in spring of 2317. I was working on my BA in Genetic Engineering, and I was working in the lab late one night with some other students and this one guy, Skylar, we used to know.” I tried to formulate my next statement carefully, a truth drug administered by the bailiff engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight with the counter agent my lawyer had given me before the trial. “Nobody really liked Skylar, y’see, but he had the best weed ever.”

Good, I thought. You said weed instead of tobacco.

“Anyway, my friend Hamid – he was from Tulsa – Hamid was all fascinated by this experiment they did in back around the turn of the century. The Oregon Regional Primate Research center took genes from a jellyfish and grafted them into the ova of a monkey. Well, two hundred and twenty four ova, to be exact.”

I swallowed nervously and then smiled at the Judge, ignoring the jury entirely. She didn’t bother to look up from her computer screen, and I couldn’t recognize the pattern that reflected off her glasses. My little sister had been a lawyer for a short time, before the accident, and her second clone had grown up obsessed with the history of the legal profession. The topic of her master’s thesis was the trial of a former professional athlete who’d been accused of killing his ex-wife and her boyfriend. Apparently it had been big news in its day, dominating the old news infrastructure for five straight years. I could imagine how frustratingly boring that must have been – she only worked on that paper for a year and I was already sick of hearing about it three months in. The only part that really stuck with me, though, was a humorous little snippet about the Judge – Hirohito was his name, I think. She said it was a well known fact that he – that was, of course, back when men could still be judges – spent the entire trial playing a video game called “Doom.” I wondered what game my judge was playing. Probably “Hangman.”

“Only forty of those eggs could be fertilized,” I went on, mopping my brow, “and only five of them managed to implant. Of those five pregnancies, only three were born live, and of those three, only one had the jellyfish gene, and it only glowed if you put it under a blacklight.”

“Objection, your honor,” the prosecuting attorney interrupted, raising a massive, barnacle-encrusted claw. She clicked her mandibles impatiently and said: “Testimony is irrelevant and boring.”

“Overruled,” replied the judge, not taking her eyes off the screen. “Continue, young man.”  The prosecutor sat back down in a huff, one of her tentacles flicking slightly in irritation.

“Well, it was late, mid-terms were over, and our lab had just received its first Lifeform Replicator – I know, you can get one at Wal-Mart these days, but back then it was a really big deal for a university lab to get the funding for one. Anyway, we were pretty high, and Hamid and his boyfriend were all ‘Hey, lets see if we can recreate that experiment!’ So I went down to the marine biology lab and raided the specimen tanks while Velma went back to her cell at the convent to get one of the rhesus monkeys she kept to feed her two-headed pythons. By the time she got back with one we we’d already gutted and gene-mapped the jellyfish and a few squid just for good measure.” I reached for my glass of water but took the judge’s by mistake. When its contents turned out to be vodka, I inwardly praised L Ron Hubbard. “Velma harvested the entire contents of the monkey’s ovaries and then we went to work. It took us until sunrise to get the genetic matrix setup properly, and by that time were all so baked and exhausted that right after I turned on the replicator we all passed out. When I woke up that afternoon the lab was filled with monkeys – man, they were everywhere!”

“How many monkeys would you say there were, Mister Oppenheimer?” my attorney asked.

“It was a long time ago,” I responded, sheepishly, “but I think the surveillance scanners put the number at three hundred and twenty five.” The judge choked a bit upon hearing this.

“Young man,” she said, rising anger in her tone, “are you quite sure you accounted for them all?”

“Your honor,” my attorney interrupted, “you’re not suggesting that my client is responsible for New York City’s ongoing monkey problem, are you? Because, if you are, I’m afraid I’m going to have to move for a mistrial.” Her hand moved to the large red button on the desk in front of her.

My sister’s clone told me once that, back in the 20th century, “mistrial” meant that the current proceeding was scrapped and a new trial had to be scheduled – it had absolutely nothing to do with electrocution.

“Please continue, Mr. Oppenheimer,” the judge said politely.

“Well, no,” I murmured, “I’m not sure that we got them all. That’s really the whole point. Y’see, the monkeys were, well, weird. They weren’t like your usual feeder monkeys. The first one had already mastered American Sign Language by the time I woke up. In the time it took me to wake the other guys up, twelve of them had already applied to graduate school, and two of them had signed record contracts with an independent label. I was afraid of what would happen to my chances of getting into the masters program at McDonalds Technical Institute if they weren’t stopped soon. Luckily, Greenpeace had an office on campus, and those guys were usually armed to the teeth, so we raided their armory and methodically swept from lab to lab killing the little buggers. You might have heard about it, your honor – it got us on Oprah. I mean, y’know, before she attained enlightenment.”

“Praised be the Bodhisattva,” intoned the bailiff.

“Praised be the Bodhisattva!” responded the gallery. That part always creeped me out.

“Can we get on with this, your honor?” the prosecutor asked, snorting with derision.

“Anyway, after graduation,” I continued, a lump forming in my throat, “I really didn’t give them a second thought. I graduated, went to MTI for a while, dropped out, followed some clones of the Grateful Dead around for a few decades, and ended up a window washer at the Ohio Mega-Ziggurat for. Thats where I met my wife. She decided in fall of ’35 that we were going to move back to New York. I hooked up with a window washing crew that works the old Freedom Tower. The money is good and I get great benefits but –” the prosecutor hovered a claw over the big red button on her desk, daring me to continue “–well, anyway, its 3AM, August fifth, and I’m up on this scaffolding washing the hundred and fourteenth story. My visor gets all fogged up so I wipe it off and when the plexi-glass is clear I see this monkey.”

“The same species of monkey as in your experiment?” asked my attorney.

“Oh yeah – spitting image of Velma’s feeder,” I replied. “And she had this big flashlight, like the kind they used to take on camp-outs when there was still wilderness and hot dogs were still legal. So I’m stunned… just… stunned. She looks straight into my eyes… sorta smiles at me. Then we both notice this blimp going by. We both stare at the blimp for a few seconds, then she turned on the flashlight. Damn, it was bright.” I took another swig of the vodka. “She just about blinded me with it, and then she turned it on the blimp. Her eyes sorta glowed green for a second, and suddenly the beam coming from the flashlight turned this deep, intense sort of red. The blimb caught fire, and started plummeting from the sky real fast. It crashed down on top of Madison Square Garden, right in the middle of roller derby… I knew that cuz my wife was there competing that night…” The judge looked horror stricken. “Oh, don’t worry, she survived. She’s tough.” I cleared my throat again. “Well, yeah, anyway, I’m guessing the monkey had developed some sort of psychokinetic ability whereby it could manipulate and intensify active light sources, in this case turning a simple flashlight into an powerful laser weapon. So what could I do? I jumped into my powered armor, activated my jetpack and –”

“Objection, your honor!” the prosecutor shouted in rage. “This has absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Oppenheimer’s five unpaid parking tickets!”

The entire court fell silent.

“Sustained,” the judge coolly replied. “This trial has become extremely silly.”

“What do you suggest we do, your honor?” asked a giant inflatable duck.

“Oh, let’s just execute him and go out to the cinema. The Regency is playing an old Monty Python movie.” Everyone pressed their red buttons simultaneously, and a sixteen ton weight fell from the ceiling, crushing me flat.

And I lived happily ever after.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We would like to apologize for the content of this story. The author was originally tasked with writing a story about a futuristic light bulb fetishist acting out a sexually charged scene in her basement with a manwhore, but, well, he’s not a very good writer, and he’s usually drunk. When I came in Monday morning I found him sprawled out on my desk, smelling of bathtub Irish cream and covered in those self-adhesive flowers people put on their bathtubs to stop their grandmothers from falling and breaking their hips. The above story was written in magic marker on the inside cover of a first printing of Beowulf. It took my secretary hours to decipher and transcribe. Please, if you see the author anywhere near a liquor store or drinking establishment, call 911. Thank you.