The Oracle of All Wisdom put down the phone. He felt deeply disturbed. No doubt the caller derived much relief out of the advice he had dispensed, has they always do. He wondered what they would think if they knew how inept he was at following his own advice. He in turn derived relief from the reassurances and advice that he received from the Oracle of Oracles of All Wisdom, who in turn, turned to the Oracle of Oracles of Oracles of All Wisdom, and so on and so forth. In the end, nobody was good at following his own advice. However, when his own advice was given to him by another, when the same assurances he screamed to himself over and over were plainly spoken to him by another soul, everything changed. There was no Ultimate Oracle.

He found a MIDI version of the Star Trek: Next Generation theme song saved somewhere among his backup files. He felt acute nostalgia as he listened to it. Not only because that series was better than any of the later Star Trek incarnations that he now happened to have on DVD, but also because it reminded him of the time when he first started watching TNG on TV. Those were the days, he thought. He was about sixteen at the time and had no idea how is life, and indeed, he himself, was to change in the coming ten years. He never (well, almost never) got tired to telling himself that life was not as simple as it used to be when he was a teenager. His readers, on the other hand, were a different story.

He was having trouble with the Twin Paradox. If one twin remains on Earth while the other travels near the speed of light for a decade, upon returning, the astronaut twin would be younger than the stationary twin due to relativistic time dilation. But then again, velocity is relative. So relative to the moving twin's ship, it's the Earth that has been traveling near the speed of light. So it's the stationary twin who should experience time dilation with respect to the moving one. He was sure that he was missing something here, but he didn't know what. He was too embarrassed to ask the friendly neighborhood relativity expert.

“You incompetent morons!” yelled the boss, the veins in his forehead bulging. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

With each booming word, the necks of the cohorts seem to sink deeper and deeper into their chest cavities. Had it not been for the sheer magnitude of the stupidity involved, he would have been awed by the giant pile of tools that now stood before him.

“I told you to round up every spammer within ten mile radius -- not every spanner! Now get these things back to their rightful owners!”

The cohorts nodded in fright and scurried away.

The Overlord Uber-robots were deadly. To a certain extent, they had been created in the image of their creators, the overlords themselves. Only a hundred times larger. The average adult overlord grew to a height of about two meters. They had the shape of a large upside down teardrop. Their bottoms tapered off in a short tail that dragged along the floor as its owner floated on a ring like graviton-repulsion platform. The mutant overlords had nothing in their anatomy to support them on a flat surface. After thousands of years of genetic mutations aimed at enhancing their brains, their legs were gone. (The narrator considered a different analogy -- a giant floating radish with two large hands, no legs and a very large pair of eyes).

The Hindi Movie Hero had just succeeded in beating up an entire village with his bare hands. But alas, his victory was to be short lived. Just as he was about to grab the bearded, sunglass and white suit wearing, cane carrying bad guy, and ask where he was hiding the bomb, he heard a loud and extremely annoying hubbub from the far end of the village. His worst fears were confirmed. It was his mother. She was running toward the only group of thugs who where still standing, yelling, imploring not to hurt her son, who just happened to be in control of the situation.

“Oh no, not again,” he thought.

But oh yes it was. Predictably, the thugs captured the wailing woman, saree and all, and threatened the Hero into submission. Thus the Indian Movie Murphy’s Law was proven yet again: just as the hero is about to make things go right, his mother / mother-in-law / wife / girlfriend will run into the scene and make things go horribly wrong.

The dust was beginning to settle around the broken down door. He could see her silhouette standing in the door way, against the bright hallway lights -- an overbearing and menacing silhouette. He recognized the object nestled in her hand as a Mark II plasma pistol. From that distance, he could not tell whether it was set to stun or kill.

"Mr. Frosty?" she inquired sarcastically.

"Mr. Frost" he corrected.

"I think he deserves a name change, the poor sod" she said, fingers tightening around the pistol handle.

"You know I can't change a characters name mid story"

She was small, but her twelve inch heels made her look one foot taller. In fact, they made her look exactly one foot taller. Because there were twelve inches in a foot. There still is.

The heels where equipped with built in stabilizing gyros that made what would otherwise have been an acrobatic feat of balance look completely natural.

"Then I guess you leave me no choice"

"I guess I don't"

"Goodbye, Kermie"

As the leading plasma pulse hit him, he instantly knew the weapon's setting: kill. The story was never published.

Mr. Frost popped another banana into his mouth. And then another. After a while, he gathered enough strength to free himself of the half-melted ice. He may have been frozen for five hundred years, and very, very hungry, but he remembered what he was doing last. There must be at least five tons of vintage banana buried underneath him. It would be at least another ten minutes before the first Mutant Overlord Banana Detection Alert is triggered. Mr. Frost knew nothing of the Mutant Overlords. But itdid occur to him how fascinating it was for a person with his last name to get buried in ice.

The Mutant Overlords takeover of Earth was swift. In the meantime, the narrator was considering two options: Mutant Overlord was clearly too cumbersome -- it was bound to appear many times during the course of the story. He considered a footnote: henceforth referred to as MO, but quickly decided against it. He came to a compromise -- not capitalizing the two words would make it easier to type. And once in a while, he could simply say overlord, but then again, that would smack too much of Arthur C. Clarkes Childhoods End. He suddenly remembered he had work to do. Mr. Frosts demise at the hands of overload Uber-Robots would have to wait till his next tea break.But he gets only two tea breaks a day.

He writes better when he writes on a whim, without any planning, preparation or expectations. For some strange reason, he imagined a whim to be something like a fluffy cloud. And he was floating on a whim. This reminded him of a TV show he watched as a kid. There was this Kung-Fu proficient monkey. He would whistle while waving two fingers in front of his mouth and a green fluffy cloud would come. He (the monkey, not our protagonist) would travel on the cloud. The monkey also had a Chinese long stick that he magically shrunk and kept hidden away in his ear. Or maybe he imagined it all (the protagonist, not the monkey).

And then there was the time when the world was destroyed by a null pointer access. God restored the Earth from a backup copy. Thank God.

Mr. Frost peeled a banana and popped it whole into his mouth. It was the first time in five hundred years that a human being had tasted a banana. Exactly what the mutant overlords had against bananas was unclear. But the threat of summary execution was enough to keep humans from not only planting, selling or eating bananas, but also from asking questions about them. Thus no human knew that bananas -- alone in the plant kingdom -- had a neurotoxin that was deadly to the mutant overlords, but completely harmless to humans.

That was, until Mr. Frost came along. He came from a long line of banana planters. He was working on his banana plantation on the very day and at the very minute in which the icy comet carrying the mutant overlords hit the earth. The area directly under the impact zone was completely devastated. But Mr. Frost's plantation was a good hundred and fifty kilometers away from ground zero, in Central Jamaica. When the two thousand meter high avalanche buried him, his plantationand in fact, half of Jamaica, he barely had enough time to think what was happening.

That was five hundred years ago. The ice had preserved Mr. Frost and his bananas fabulously. And it had taken five hundred years for the one mile thick layer of ice to melt away under the now dimmed Jamaican sun. Had it not for the impact cloud that still circled the Earth, the sun would have melted the ice in five years. That it did not, was a mixed blessing. It allowed the mutant overlords to take over Earth -- somethingthey could not have done so easily if the comet had not created their home world's climate on earth. On the other hand, had the ice melted quickly, sea levels would have risen so high that, according to some calculations, only the Himalayas, the Rockies and the Andies would have been above sea level.

He sat down to write a story where all the evil characters drank tea and all the good characters drank coffee. But the words would not come. He tried interchanging the drinks. Now the good guys would drink tea. It did not help. He became distracted by the fact that his shoe laces were loose. As he bent down to tie them, he wondered, "what would the world be like if the speed of light were three times as fast as what it is now?". He imagined he was starting to go slightly insane, with all his attempts to unify quantum mechanics and relativity on a daily basis.

Exactly one thousand three hundred and twenty two fighter units were sent to fight the Disembodied Heads. None returned. Their fighters had twice the firepower and three times the range of anything that Earth Alliance space fleet could put in their way. What's more, their pilots were directly connected to the crafts that they controlled, while the human pilots had to control their fighters by pushing buttons and pulling levers. And the life support system took three times the power. The Disembodied Heads had only a brain to support. Humans had an entire body. For the same reason, Alliance fighters had not enough space for a ejection mechanism. All the Disembodied Heads needed was a soccer ball sized sealed container.

Though the first Alliance wave was completely annihilated, the last few units managed to use many of the floating escape pods for target practice. Once ejected out of its fighter, a Disembodied Head had to sit helplessly in its escape pod until it was picked up. Thus shooting Disembodied Heads in escape pods was easier than shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, that was the exact phrase the leader of the remaining fifteen Alliance units said before he saw the heavy cruisers approaching.