A BRIEF HISTORY OF EARTH

Disclaimer: I do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material.

1. Default Chapter.

A small steamed up window slit was all I could see before me. I could hear my own breathing and feel my own heart beat inside the steel pod. I wondered why I was here. Actually, I knew why I was logically here, but the exact details of the events had escaped me.

I was once the major head in advertising for a corporation that had named itself Ab-Sorbo, after the two founders -- Don Abbott and Neil Sorbo. As it turned out, the title was well suited to the company, as their most popular product (which was available in many fruit varieties) was underarm deodorant.

Even before the disaster (which I'll get to in a moment), our product did immensely well. So well in fact, that we became the second largest distributor in the world. We were practically a pop icon, in fact. Then of course, there was the disaster.

The building I worked in, which was called Pineapple Deodorant Tower (named after our famous signature product), detonated one Friday morning. The temperature was moderate, with low humidity throughout the evening.

That's when I woke up in a pod that hadn't been too dissimilar from the one I was standing in now. The obvious difference between the two happened to be that this one was heated and provided halfway-decent mood music.

Later on, the P.D. staff met together and we discussed our predicament. We were now exact replicants of ourselves, designed with the sole purpose of continuing the Ab-Sorbo brand. Our product would make a big comeback, though not as a roll-on deodorizer. It fact, deodorizing had become obsolete with the invention of DNA re-sequensing, which had eliminated the "stank" gene.

Not too soon after that meeting, I recalled that I was reclining on a bench in Collon Memorial Park. It was then that a man with a scar on his face came up to me and notified that I was going to die soon. This failed to surprise me, since I had died once before, and was now a clone of myself. But the reason I was going to die, as it turned out, had to do with the fact that I was a clone. I suppose this is all getting a bit complicated, and I'm still trying to piece it all together myself, so bear with me.

Back to the setup: The man with the scar informed me of something I was already well aware of -- that I was going to expire within minutes. But, I thought, I might as well enjoy the whole thing without worrying about it too much.

So I exploded.

The next thing I could see was the front of the pod I was now in. The heavy door opened, and a middle-aged man wearing a labcoat with a terrible ink stain on the pocket stood before me.

"Welcome back," he said, scratching at what looked like the beginnings of a beard. "Get dressed in there." He pointed at a foreign-looking hallway.

Then I looked down and realized I was totally and utterly in the nude. Covering my genitalia, I pushed back my hair with my free hand and asked, "Where am I, exactly?"

The man huffed audibly. "Why do they all ask that?" he muttered to himself.

"Because they really want to know?" I suggested, now feeling the strongest urge to block my backside as well.

"Just go!" he spat, handing me a sealed packet with the word STERILIZED imprinted across the top in small, unfriendly letters.

As I entered the dressing room, I tore open the package. The clothing I was wearing on that fateful day in the park suddenly sprang out, plopping onto the floor. Not wanting to stay naked, I put them on and got out.

"This way," spoke a slender man in a bright yellow suit that was not unlike the ones that haz-mat officers donned. This worried me, as I wasn't wearing anything that would protect me from whatever he was afraid of getting affected by. "Excuse me," I asked. "What exactly are you defending yourself against with that get-up?"

He paused briefly. "What do you mean?"

I explained, "You're obviously wearing that in precaution... for what danger?"

"That danger would be you," he stated. He pointed down the hall. "Come with me, please."

"But wait, wait!" I reasoned. "What's so dangerous about me?"

"You are a human," he said. "I haven't done the proper research on your species yet. I've been meaning to, though."

"Oh, come on!" I said. "What am I, radioactive?"

"Actually, yes," said the man. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. "According to this, you exploded due to a sub-molecular reaction triggered by a redundance in your nucleic structure. The scientific method used in creating you was obviously very primitive." He placed the card back into his suit. "You could go off like a firecraker any minute."

My eyes popped. "Who are you?" I asked, stunned.

He could tell that the discussion was going nowhere, and so he removed his helmet. "You can call me Ford Anglia." He sighed. "It's a working title. Just trying it on to see how it fits."

After putting his helmet back on, Ford escorted me to a room filled with familiar faces, torsos, arms and legs. The tallest of them spoke up. "Dave!" The man ran up to me and gave me a hug. "Dave Grooming! How are you?"

This put me in a bit of a shock, as the man was the CEO of Ab-Sorbo, and we never so much as shook hands before this. "I--I'm fine, thank you." I wriggled out of his grip. "Er... so how's things?"

He rubbed the bald spot at the back of his head. "Okay, I guess. You know, this is getting to be a bit of a pain, having P.D. Tower bombed twice and cloning us back both times. I'm sick of it."

"Ah," I said. "But who wants to die?"

"I'd rather die than spend an eternity being killed and recreated over and over." Pathetic tears began to form under his eyes. "My soul feels so empty."

I tried to lighten up the mood. "Hey, hey. Look, my soles are quite full!" I lifted up one of my shoes. "See?"

The CEO yowled in anguish and walked off to the other end of the room.

I have to admit, it was a crummy joke.