Humancorp Incorporated Read online

  “Right,” said Sean.

  “Good,” said Noel. “Now, while all defective people are the result of manufacturing errors, there are a few really bad ones that we’ve got to take care of. You will assist me in tracking them down and capturing them.”

  “How will we do that?”

  Noel quietly lifted a net off of his desk.

  “Hey, that’s the same net that Herman showed me!” exclaimed Sean, recognizing it.

  “Yes, it is,” said Noel. “He left it here because he knew we would need it. We will capture the defective people from this particular batch with the net, then hit them with sticks until they stop moving, then shove them into this device.”

  Noel pointed to a corner of the laboratory, where, next to a centrifuge, stood something that looked remarkably like a tube. The interior of the tube was obviously contoured to match a human body. Near the area where the head should be, green lightning crackled across the tube.

  “Uh, what’s that?” said Sean.

  “It’s the brain reprogrammer,” said Noel. “Dinero wants me to ship the defective people back to the factory for repair, but nuts to that, I say! Like I’m going to kowtow to a bunch of rude factory robots that think they’re better than me just because they’re machines and therefore have no emotion or capacity for conscious thought or inclination to arm homicidal maniacs! Instead, we’re going to bring the defective people here, where I will reprogram them with this brain reprogrammer, thereby fixing their personality defects, or at least changing them, and then we’ll release them back into the wild.”

  Sean looked at it curiously.

  “How does the brain reprogrammer work?” he said.

  “I’m glad you asked,” Noel said brightly. “I’ll try to explain it in terms a layman can understand. Suppose your brain is this apple.”

  He took an apple out of his jacket.

  Then, he smashed the hell out of the apple with a large hammer.

  “In case you were wondering,” said Noel as he wiped flecks of juice and apple core off of his face, “in that analogy, the brain reprogrammer was the hammer.”

  “I got that,” said Sean.

  “Anyway, the brain reprogrammer really is a marvelous device,” Schwartz said, patting it as it sparked green lightning and sizzled. “Let me demonstrate. I received a number of documents from Dinero about you, including your resumé and your CV and so on, and I understand you have too many personality defects.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Sean.

  “Well, I see here in this recommendation from your previous employer, a certain Mr. Clarence Pittward, that you’re a ‘-lying, cheating, stealing, treasonous, smelly, lecherous, womanizing, lazy, narcoleptic, insane, forgetful, insubordinate, goldfish-hating, profane, cruel, evil, drug-addicted, sociopathic...’ Sheesh, this really goes on! I can’t read out all this. I’d die from old age. Anyway, the point is that you have a lot of personality flaws, like your kleptomania.”

  Noel slapped away Sean’s hand, which had been rooting around in one of the pockets of his lab coat.

  “No I don’t,” Sean protested as he looked through Noel’s wallet.

  “Or your tendency to lie.”

  “I don’t have a tendency to lie,” said Sean. “Just ask my good friend, the Pope.”

  “Or your destructive impulses.”

  Sean shattered a nearby test tube and laughed as its contents started to smoke on the desk.

  “Anyway, the point is that this is a lot of flaws for one person to have. I can clean them up for you, if you’d like. Then you’d only be left with a few.”

  “Gee,” Sean said, considering. “I don’t think that’s a very good-”

  But while he’d been talking, Noel had shoved him into the tube. A glass shield slid down over the front of the tube, and Sean started to pound on it with his hand, to no avail. The green lightning crackled around his forehead.

  “Don’t worry,” called Noel, manning a nearby computer. “This won’t hurt enough to drive you insane or lead you to spend the rest of your life consumed with vengeance against me.”

  He pressed a button. Sean started to scream as bolts of electricity pulsed between his temples.

  “Now, I’m just burning off the parts of your brain responsible for all these personality traits you have... there goes your cruelty, and sociopathy, and lecherous womanizing tendencies, and your incontinence and sadism and recklessness...”

  A warning light started to blink on Noel’s computer.

  “Hm...” he said. “This warning indicates that I can’t get rid of all your flaws, like your kleptomania and lying, because your brain will explode if I try. Too bad. I really should get rid of the kleptomania and lying anyway. Do you want me to try?”

  “No,” cried Sean.

  “Fine, fine,” Noel muttered, and pressed a button on the computer console. “I should use the presets from now on.”

  Green lightning zapped between Sean’s temples again, arcing over his forehead, dancing across his eyes and flossing his teeth with its electric currents before the machine finally crackled and died. The apparatus’ glass door suddenly slid open and Sean fell out onto the floor, his hair smoking.

  “Now, I’ve gotten rid of most of your personality traits - er, I mean, flaws,” said Noel. “Why, you’re practically a mindless drone!”

  “Hooray,” said Sean, picking himself up off the floor and extinguishing his hair.

  “We can even get rid of your ugliness and foul smell using these,” Noel said benevolently, handing Sean deodorant and an angle grinder.

  “Ffff,” said Sean, and dropped the angle grinder. He swayed unsteadily on his feet.

  “Too bad I couldn’t get rid of all your flaws,” Noel said. “Pity. I’ll have to work on that for later, but you’ll notice your drug and alcohol addiction are gone! And it only cost you a few hundred IQ points. You may be dumber than you were before, but there’s something wrong with everything. You didn’t need to know how to speak, right?”

  “Brbrbrble?” Sean asked.

  Noel whacked him in the face.

  “Ugh,” Sean said. “I have a headache.”

  “Here,” Noel said, offering him a pill. “Take this to get rid of the pain.”

  “Thanks - wait, is this a suicide pill?”

  “Maybe,” Noel said shiftily.

  Sean threw it into the nearby garbage.

  “Hm, maybe I should have made you more credulous and less suspicious while I was at it,” said Noel. “Oh well. There’s always next time. Anyway, that’s the brain reprogrammer for you. It really is an amazing machine. In fact, it doesn’t just have the power to reprogram your brain. Using the same electrical signals, it can reprogram everyone’s brains!”

  “I mean, I kinda figured that,” Sean said, sitting down and trying to remember if he’d stolen any aspirin recently.

  “No, I mean, it can reprogram them all at once, remotely,” said Noel. “When we’re reprogramming you or some other slob, we can use the resonance from your brain to reprogram everyone else’s around the world. See, if we only reprogrammed you, it might be that everyone else would notice you were different and suspect something, but Humancorp is secret, so we can’t have that.” Noel laughed genially. “So we simply developed a system to remotely rejigger the brains of everyone else on Earth so they don’t think it’s weird when you start acting differently. With this system, we can kidnap - er, I mean - recover, a defective human who’s, say, a politician or a mortgage broker and then use the brain reprogrammer to turn him into a productive member of society, like a volunteer firefighter or a crack dealer, and no one will think its weird! The person who was reprogrammed won’t remember because we’ll program him not too, and then the resonance from his brain will make everyone else think it’s perfectly normal, and no one will suspect or notice anything. To be more accurate, the process doesn’t work on everyone. People who have tin foil hats over their heads are protected, but everyone else will be adjusted to think
the reprogrammed defective person is completely normal!”

  “Neat,” said Sean, scratching his head, which was still ringing and painful from the reprogramming process. Maybe he should have taken the suicide pill after all. He clasped his hands to his temples for a moment. “I don’t get how we’re supposed to figure out who the defective people are, though.”

  Noel gave him a very firm kick to the shin.

  “Ow!” Sean said, and started hopping up and down.

  “Non-defective people scream about two octaves higher than that when you kick them in the shins.”

  Sean fell to the floor from the pain, rolling around with his eyes watering.

  “Isn’t there a better way than that?” he gasped.

  “There’s another way,” Noel said. “I wouldn’t say better. Step right this way.”

  He walked over to a different corner of the laboratory, though it took Sean a while to regain his footing and follow Noel. In this particular corner, there was a massive, blocky metal contraption with something like a satellite dish and an antenna sticking out of the top, and a TV monitor in the front.

  “I recently invented this device to help track down defective people who we need to recall for safety reasons,” said Noel. “It so happens that defective people emit a plethora of similar signals depending on what kind of radioactive fluid I injected into their brains - I mean, depending on what kind of completely accidental manufacturing defect occurred at the factory, because of the robots. Yes, the robots. Anyway, I built this device to tap into all the government’s global monitoring systems: the GPS system, the cell phone towers, the power grid, the sewer system, and so on. Whenever it detects the signal from a defective person, it lights up on this map.”

  He gestured to a map of the world on the device’s monitor. Right now, the device seemed to be zoomed in on one contact in particular. The screen showed a glowing red dot in the middle of a city that Sean could not immediately identify.

  “That dot indicates that there’s a defective person somewhere in the vicinity,” explained Noel. “My system is detecting trace amounts of inconsiderateness and stupidity. However, it doesn’t tell us exactly who the defective person is. To figure that out, I invented this!”

  He took out a small wand-like black object that looked a lot like an airport security guard’s metal detector.

  “It’s a mobile defect-detector,” said Noel. “It starts to beep when I point it at a defective person.”

  He gave it a few experimental waves around. It beeped when oriented towards Sean.

  “Why does it do that?” asked Sean. “Is it broken?”

  Noel gave a faint chuckle.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll just have to modify it to ignore you or something. Anyway, let’s go to this location.” He pointed to the screen with the red dot on it. “The internet says it’s a restaurant. We’ll use this magic wand defect-detector to identify the defective person, then capture him with the net, then beat him up, then drag him back here and reprogram him.”

  “Great,” said Sean. “How are we going to get there?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, you know that?” said Noel. “Don’t worry. I have a way to get there in good time. Fortunately, I have recently invented a teleportation device! Let me show you.”

  Noel led Sean into a different room of the laboratory.

  “Behold!” Noel said. “My teleportation device!”

  Then, he flipped on the lights.

  Sitting in the middle of the room was a donkey cart, complete with the donkey cart driver who had taken Sean to Humancorp in the first place. The cart driver picked his nose and the donkey chewed on some important cabling as Sean stared at them.

  “It uses the sheer strength of the donkey to tear a hole in the fabric of space-time,” said Noel. “Into the cart!”

  Shrugging, Sean stole a length of wire from a bench, then clambered into the cart. Noel followed him.

  “I just have to give the donkey the coordinates of the restaurant,” said Noel, and pulled down a computer monitor on a swing-arm, which he set to show a map of where they wanted to go. The cart driver enticed the donkey to look at it using a carrot.

  Suddenly, the world started to vibrate. The donkey pawed at the ground. Everything went blue. Lights flickered. Sean’s headache intensified. He tried to imagine why. Maybe it was because he’d just had a half-million volts discharged across his skull, but it could also be a migraine brought on by extreme hunger. He hadn’t eaten anything all day.

  “Did you say that this was a restaurant we’re going to?” asked Sean. “Maybe we could have lunch there.”

  “Well...” said Noel. “I did just swallow a whole bottle of suicide pills, but okay. We can eat while we’re there.”

  “Great,” said Sean.

  The donkey gnashed and grunted against its harness, its hooves stamping the ground, and soon, the fabric of space-time itself was rent in twain. Braying, the donkey charged forward, and the entire donkey cart disappeared in a flash of blue light.

  Chapter 13

  The donkey cart materialized with the sound of a rubber band snapping.

  “Would you please stop that?” asked Sean. “I have a very bad headache.”

  “No,” Noel demurred. “This is very important.”

  He kept right on snapping the rubber band.

  “You see, I’m trying to use this as a metaphor to explain how we just teleported,” he started. “Imagine that the fabric of space-time is like this rubber band, and we are like your forehead.”

  Sean ducked as Noel launched the rubber band at him.

  “Last stop,” the cart driver said. “Everybody out.”

  They were sitting in a parking lot in the middle of a small strip mall in a much larger city. A skyline with tall buildings that Sean didn’t recognize stretched out into the distance.

  “Where is this restaurant where we’re supposed to find this defective person?” asked Sean.

  Noel pointed across the street to a small, grubby establishment with a slanted, tiled roof and a cream-colored exterior. A sign over the door identified it as the “Café de Food.”

  Although neither Sean or Noel knew it, or even suspected it, the Café de Food was not a very nice restaurant. It was one of the worst eateries in the United States, having earned a rating of negative three Michelin stars and a skull and crossbones from the health inspector, but an A+ from the military’s chemical weapons facility storage evaluators. The chefs at the Café de Food were famous for their creativity, using a combination of bold ingredients, like roadkill, nitroglycerin, sewage, and kale to produce noxious dishes that were essentially inedible. The menu had very little selection, because the chefs who ran the joint figured that it all tasted the same anyway, so there was no point in giving the customer a choice. They had later rearranged the menu by labelling dishes according to what type of food poisoning or severe gastrointestinal illness you could expect to get from eating there. Food critics praised the mellow ambiance but condemned the food for hospitalizing them. However, the CIA was not nearly so critical, having applauded the restaurant for the invaluable national security service it provided, since terrorists would, when faced with the prospect of eating dishes from the Café de Food, inevitably start spilling their guts (both in literal and figurative senses).

  It had three stars on Yelp.

  The proprietor of the Café de Food was a very fat man named William Eats. Will Eats was a famous chef. After being inspired at an early age by images of celebrity chefs shouting at people without reprisal, he had developed a passion for all things culinary and digestible. Eats had learned cooking on the streets and subsequently cooked his way out of Hell’s Kitchen. He had wandered from place to place for years, traveling across the country in search of a cooking TV show that would agree to take him, making his living by cooking food on the streets and extracting money from customers in exchange for promises that they wouldn’t have to eat it. Eventually, he was able to extort a favorable lea
se agreement from a land-lord with indigestion and opened the Café de Food, a local one-stop shop for the hungry man. His restaurant had survived a number of scandals, including an incident where he served undercooked meat to the customers - which the customers realized when their dish started to oink - and when local reporters spotted a garbage truck backing up into the warehouse behind his shed. Mr. Eats subsequently cleared up the cloud of suspicion that hung over his business in the aftermath of the incident by assuring people he was not serving raw garbage to his customers. In later clarifications, he stated that they weren’t serving cooked garbage either. The garbage truck that the reporters had spotted had not been delivering garbage or anything of the sort; rather it had simply been picking up the dead bodies of the customers that had eaten lunch at the Café de Food and subsequently died of a series of unfortunate and unrelated meltings of their internal organs, which Mr. Eats and his staff chalked up to the weather.

  Mr. Eats was the defective human being who Noel and Sean had come to capture for their safety recall, although they didn’t yet know it. They wandered into the restaurant with a little hunger and curiosity, which is never a good combination, because even under favorable conditions it almost always ends up with you eating dishes with rotten fish in them that the Scandinavians have convinced gullible foreigners are a Finnish delicacy. Fortunately for Noel and Sean, the Café de Food did not have any rotten fish. Unfortunately, it did have a lot of other food that the Scandinavians would probably declare a Finnish delicacy while giggling uncontrollably.

  The interior of the Café de Food gave a visitor no inkling that it might be one of the worst restaurants on the planet. It had a large collection of unorganized circular and rectangular tables inside. The carpet was a gentle red, and a single very large fan whipped around the front of the room, just above one of the nearest tables. Muzak was playing quietly over the room, mashing poorly with the dialogue from a TV nearby, which was tuned to the news.