The Astrophysicist

So this astrophysicist walks into a bar, splits his skull wide fucking open, falls to the ground and dies. Which is a shame, really, because he had, in those brief seconds between colliding with the exposed pipe and collapsing to the ground a bloodied corpse, had an idea that could easily have been amplified into a cheap and powerful source of energy that would get mankind to Mars right quick. The really tragic part is that, had he survived, his equally hyper-intelligent wife would have been able to think of a way to make Mars habitable in an astoundingly rapid fashion and they both would have been deliriously happy and ridiculously wealthy, heralded as the saviors of mankind, because, let’s face it, this planet is getting closer and closer to being totally and irreversibly screwed and pretty much the only way to save our pitiful existence is to move elsewhere, start over, and try a whole lot harder not to fuck that up, too. But the astrophysicist is dead now and his wife is going to be, pretty damn soon. See, she’ll be crossing one of the busier streets in New York City when her cell phone will ring, the police officer on the other end calling to inform her of her husband’s calamity. So distracted will she be by this, she won’t see the cab barelling down the avenue at an alarming speed. The bumper will take out her legs, then her torso will hit the windshield, followed by the whole of her body rolling along the roof, she’ll die, then she’ll hit the street with a sickening thud. The cab driver won’t be charged, as reckless as he’s being right now and as responsible as he’s going to be for the incident, because there’s a pregnant lady going into labor in the back of the cab, and the driver is going to be the one to talk the woman’s soon-to-be ex-fiancé through the delivery, and that’ll be enough to convince the jury that the accident isn’t going to have been his fault. Anyway, he’ll get mugged and killed six days after that, so, karmically speaking, it’ll be cool. Well, karmically, his taking a life at the exact same instant he brings about a new life will be regarded as okay in the overwhelming cosmic balance sense, but it’ll be his death at the hands of a desperate hobo that will make the national news and calm down everyone who’s going to think that he should’ve been penalized for killing the astrophysicist’s wife, plus it’s going to make quite a few people think about the fragile nature of their own mortality. Which is kind of funny, seeing as how had Earl Windheim thought about human fragility, especially as it relates to head injuries, just a few days earlier, he very well would have padded the exposed pipe and thus the astrophysicist would have only slightly bruised his forehead, sparking the quick energy idea while at the same time not dying horribly of a massive cranial hemorrahage. But Earl didn’t, so we’re not going to Mars. Which is good in a way, because the baby that’s about to be born in the back of the taxi is gonna be one evil fucking baby. Well, actually, *is* one evil fucking baby. Which means that going forward, any and all references to the astrophysicist’s wife will have to be in the past tense. Although, really, she’s pretty much played her part in this narrative, so that clarification probably wasn’t, and won’t be, needed. Regardless, had we eventually been bestowed with the capacity to journey to and colonize Mars, the baby–her name’s shortly going to be Emelie Rathskellar, by the way–would have been elected to an as yet unnamed position of galactic power, declared martial law on two planets and six moons, taken over the whole of Mars with a prototype robot army while the rest of the galaxy was thusly distracted, and then she would’ve attacked the Earth. Which, in and of itself, wouldn’t be so bad, but she would’ve ended up obliterating more than two-thirds of the solar system in the process and, well, that’d be just a bit unneccesary. Especially considering what we would’ve been doing on Pluto at that point. Nifty shit, let me tell you. Which is why I’m so pissed off about this ‘damning of all humanity to an earthbound existence’ thing. I was really looking forward to ending up with a nice, cushy laboratory of my own on Charon, but now, now, I’m going to be late for my interview, I’ve got blood on my pants and there’s a good chance I’m not even going to be let past security because of that, and, damn it, I really need a smoke, but Bill, the genius astrophysicist, can’t hand me a lighter and look forward at the same time.

Published in Saucy Vox, a lovely magazine that no longer exists.