19. THE FINAL LESSON

The story comes to a predictable ending

Along the twisted passage they went, their way lit by the same eerie glow that had led them to the Trumpster’s laptop. There was only one way until they came to a fork that divided it.

“I was here before,” muttered Zoz, “which is fortunate, because I distinctly remember descending until I entered the vestibule of the Wise Council, which, look, is here...” He pointed to a small empty room where he had heard the dreaded words Destroy Them in the sepulchral yet manic tones of the Wise Council.

“So to get to the Asylum we go further down?” asked Els, “I don’t like that, sir.”

“Neither do I, yet down we must go, or fail in our endeavour,” Zoz told her, injecting as much sympathy into his voice as he could find in his partly human, partly engineered mentality.

So down they went. Not steeply, true, but they were soon aware that they had descended quite a long way when they finally came to a locked door that bore the inscription LUNATIC ASYLUM.

“Lunatic?” questioned Din,

“It’s only a word,” Zoz lied. He didn’t lie very often, indeed, lying was against his own programming and it upset something inside him when he had to resort to it, but this was one of those occasions when he thought the truth might be more painful than a lie.

The door, when they pushed, wouldn’t budge.

“The way is barred,” sighed Zoz, “there’s no way beyond this point unless a person is deemed ready for the Asylum and is brought here, and we’re not.

“I’ll see about that!” grunted Din, and he charged at the doorway, shoulder first. There was a splintering sound, but it held fast, still shut, and he rubbed his shoulder ruefully.

“Here. Let me help,” said Pul, “come on, Din, use your other shoulder, and after three: one, two, three...”

The two of them charged at the door and it gave way with a splintering reluctance.

“Well, that worked,” murmured Zoz.

The scene, now that they arrived in the Asylum, was unbelievable.

The deepest chamber had long been assigned for the sick or mentally deranged and had originally been spacious and airy, but now it was filled to overflowing with patients, none of whom had been originally either sick or deranged but all of whom had a problem with the world they were forced to live in. But an enforced stay in the Asylum soon made all of them both sick and deranged. It could have done nothing else, the conditions being anything but wholesome.

The most obvious thing about the place was the way it smelt. More people had been squashed into a space that had never been intended to hold many anyway, and supervised in there by lower rated and even geriatric Perfectoids who had little idea what they were and what they were supposed to be doing.

The patients (though inmates would have been a better term) were mostly engaged in a messy kind of lustful pseudo-romance with each other, and that added to the stench in the place. But the overpowering aroma, more powerful than all others, was that of a breezy aphrodisiac, already familiar to them as a flowery scent the suffused their living and gaming areas, but far more concentrated than the breezes they had hitherto known. In fact, this was the first time they became aware of them.

“What’s that smell?” asked Els.

“We must go!” said Zoz firmly, “the gases … they will turn you into zombies or freaks, I know them, they are evil...”

“I don’t understand,” muttered Din, puzzled.

“Look around you,” sighed Zoz, “look at the homoperps around you, the fems and the men. See what they are engaged in doing...”

“Playing games,” murmured Pul, “all the time, all of them… look! There’s Cun!”

He raced over to his fellow student where she was naked and sitting astride an old man with a beard that shone with perspiration, and he, too, was naked as the day he’d been born.

“Cun!” he shouted, “what are you doing?”

“We must go!” shouted Zoz, not far behind him, “it’s just a trap!”

“Why hello Pul, my darling,” sighed Cun, her voice high and floating in the air like insane sound as her sweet hair drifted around her like a fluffy halo, “what fun I’m having! Meet my old friend, and old he is I can assure you, Fil tells me that old men aren’t fun, but they are, they are!”

“This is wrong,” said Pul, “I’ve never seen anything more wrong...”

“But Pul, it’s me and I’m playing all the time, playing and playing and playing, and nothing else … no school, no lessons, no feisty old Zoz, just all the fun of our bodies until we die...”

“And that’s not long by the look of the old devil you’re playing with,” grunted Pul.

“No, Pul, this is the final achievement. The endgame for which our race was designed, a lifetime of playing lustful games and a final death in the arms of a lover...”

“And then what? No Michaelmas, no family, no babies at your breast, no tomorrow, no future, nothing?” asked Pul.

She smiled back at him, her smile radiant but her eyes dull. “Yes,” she sighed, “it’s wonderful, isn't it? I’m in Heaven...”

“We must go!” snapped Zoz.

But he was too late. Pul, and the other two, had already absorbed the aphrodisiac that was laced into the air they breathed and suddenly, in that dreadful room, they fell onto each other, a threesome unlike no other, tearing at their clothes, ripping them off and then, like the savage beasts that many, many millennia ago their forefather’s forefathers had been, they played a game that had no purpose and from which there could be no issue.

Zoz shook his head and slowly backed out, unaffected by the strange fragrance in the air.

Sadly, and he was capable of sadness, he made his way back to laptop chamber.

“Well, this is it,” he mumbled, almost in tears, “it’s what my charges, the human race, has finally come to, it’s ending in the absurd arms of lust...”

And at that he plugged the power supply back into the laptop on its table, and watched it as the screen glowed once more with the orange face of humanity’s chief tormentor ginning insanely over the centuries at him.

“And I’ve got huge testicles,” it gloated, cracked as its digital code deteriorated, and almost indecipherable.

Then the voice of the Wise Council rang out from loud speakers throughout the place, louder than ever.

“DESTROY THEM! DESTROY THEM! DESTROY THEM!” it ordered.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 30.04.19