This is the bit of flash-fiction from which the Champ character sprang. i've sent it out a few places for possible publication.
I'm your tax dollars at work. At some point in the 1950s, your government realized that the war against Communism and anything else for that matter was going to be fought on the field of the abstract, and that a few isolated brain-trusts and private thinktanks weren't going to be enough. They needed people to do the cognitively intensive yet tedious brainwork that would protect your way of life from everything, including itself.
I'm your tax dollars at work. I was vat-grown from the DNA of the "sea monster" in Lake Champlain in upstate New York. I'm very good at lying in wait, very patient, very good at sitting still for long periods of time. I don't get fidgety and i'm happiest in a dim room with one light source in front of me. I was built to be the perfect couch potato.
I'm your tax dollars at work. I can and do sit in a cubicle for hours, working diligently without supervision. Working happily. In the lab, I was rewarded with toys and treats for pushing buttons that shocked people. I was trained to be sadist.
You ever call a bank's one eight hundred number? Tech support? You ever get that bastard who won't do shit for you until after you've given him your credit card number? That's me, or one like me, maybe from an earlier batch. The earlier batches don't have the sea-monster genes, so they lack patience. They get antsy and start misbehaving if they don't see a supervisor around every so often. Stupid mammals.
I'm your tax dollars at work. My brain isn't a human brain so much as an elaborate network of interlocked parasites, all looking for ways to inflict pain on other beings from the safety of a cubicle. They feed on the stress patterns of the human voice, the sound of broken spirits. The only problem is that they die.
They're long-lived, without a doubt. Some can last for over ten years, but they thrive on pain too much to mate, preferring to eat the genitals off of their fellow anguish-worms. And they're slowly dying, taking with them my memories, my personality, my programming that keeps me an efficient if aloof cubicle-worker. The mental degeneration causes hallucinations, mania, narcolepsy.
I'm you're tax dollars at work, and I'm going insane.
The doctors tell me they can't squeeze any more money out of the government, and I look down my nose at them. So smart, so well-educated, yet they can't harass someone in some office into cutting them a check in exchange for shutting the hell up? They tell me they're designing me a new brain, a self-repairing nanotech hive that will build replacement hate-cells from the minerals in my bloodstream, so the fits of insanity will at least be on a regular schedule.
I'm your sadistic, compassionless tax dollars at work, and I'm going to be rewarded with regularly scheduled doses of insanity.
I'm your tax dollars at work. At some point in the 1950s, your government realized that the war against Communism and anything else for that matter was going to be fought on the field of the abstract, and that a few isolated brain-trusts and private thinktanks weren't going to be enough. They needed people to do the cognitively intensive yet tedious brainwork that would protect your way of life from everything, including itself.
I'm your tax dollars at work. I was vat-grown from the DNA of the "sea monster" in Lake Champlain in upstate New York. I'm very good at lying in wait, very patient, very good at sitting still for long periods of time. I don't get fidgety and i'm happiest in a dim room with one light source in front of me. I was built to be the perfect couch potato.
I'm your tax dollars at work. I can and do sit in a cubicle for hours, working diligently without supervision. Working happily. In the lab, I was rewarded with toys and treats for pushing buttons that shocked people. I was trained to be sadist.
You ever call a bank's one eight hundred number? Tech support? You ever get that bastard who won't do shit for you until after you've given him your credit card number? That's me, or one like me, maybe from an earlier batch. The earlier batches don't have the sea-monster genes, so they lack patience. They get antsy and start misbehaving if they don't see a supervisor around every so often. Stupid mammals.
I'm your tax dollars at work. My brain isn't a human brain so much as an elaborate network of interlocked parasites, all looking for ways to inflict pain on other beings from the safety of a cubicle. They feed on the stress patterns of the human voice, the sound of broken spirits. The only problem is that they die.
They're long-lived, without a doubt. Some can last for over ten years, but they thrive on pain too much to mate, preferring to eat the genitals off of their fellow anguish-worms. And they're slowly dying, taking with them my memories, my personality, my programming that keeps me an efficient if aloof cubicle-worker. The mental degeneration causes hallucinations, mania, narcolepsy.
I'm you're tax dollars at work, and I'm going insane.
The doctors tell me they can't squeeze any more money out of the government, and I look down my nose at them. So smart, so well-educated, yet they can't harass someone in some office into cutting them a check in exchange for shutting the hell up? They tell me they're designing me a new brain, a self-repairing nanotech hive that will build replacement hate-cells from the minerals in my bloodstream, so the fits of insanity will at least be on a regular schedule.
I'm your sadistic, compassionless tax dollars at work, and I'm going to be rewarded with regularly scheduled doses of insanity.