PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

McDougal the Third (the successor, of course, to the

McDougals Senior and Junior, both of whom endowed this

Unversity's Biology Department) invited me to visit his

home (and that is why I was absent at that early hour when

you woke).  His enthusiasm was so intense I could not have

declined when he invited me to stop by.  "She is ready, I think,"

he said, without hesitancy, "to step out and take her place

"among her peers."  And I replied, which a genuine chuckle,

"You mean to become a debutante."  He said nothing more to

that, so I assured him I would make my way over to his

residence at once.  For several academic years, he had been my

most enterprising, and most accomplished, graduate assistant.

Even though he had surreptitiously acquired some of your own

cellular material, without permission (surely a breach of some

protocol code, somewhere), I did not complain.  I arrived as

quickly as I could and, upon my entrance into the main room

just off the foyer, she began to descend the staircase---somewhat

clumsily (as you did, at first, before you had become accustomed to

configurations).   I understood, immediately, that he, or some

unfortunate mishap, had altered the genetic code:  such that,

although her face was---as yours is---on the back of her skull, the

mouth was above the eyes, and the nose (incompletely formed)

had migrated only to the left side of her head, close to the ear.

But the supreme failure was the configuration of the hands and

feet---so that, while facing forward from the perspective of her

eyes (below her maniacal grin, so that the slobber from her

excited salivaries had begun to drip into them), she was walking

forward; yet her limbs were not forward moving but backward.

Not nude, as she descended the staircase, the gown he had

dressed her in caused her, ultimately, to stumble, and she

careened downward to a most grim impact that instantly broke

her neck.  I am glad that you have never suffered that trouble,

but McDougal's failure leads me to wonder if we will ever

find a proper procedure to reconfigure the slaves' structure to

suit our conveniences and the industrial requirements of our

economy.  Are you only an anomaly?  And not, as I had

assured the Supreme AI, the first in a vanguard that we

should be able to reproduce at will?  McDougal was not

discouraged:  as we dissected her body in order to

fit more easily into the furnace, he said, rather cheerily

considering what an abject failure upon which he had

wasted both his time and mine, "I am not discouraged.

"Remember, when I was McDougal Senior and Junior, I

"provided endowments totally unexpected simply by

"rearranging certain processes.  The concept here is the

"same; whether we are dealing with currency or the

"human flesh of the serviles . . . the concept here is the

"same."  I made a an entry in my RAM to recommend an

factory alteration to his ROM so that when he becomes

McDougal IV, some of that presumptive arrogance of his

shall be overwritten with a more amenable subroutine.

Starward