The CEO of Independent Research had always thought that being independent was the best way to go. After all, being independent meant that he could accept research contracts from all professors. One could hardly blame him for not foreseeing the effects of conducting psycho-synthetic research in proximity to a spatial wave manipulation experiment. One experiment belonged to Ludwick, the other to Cornelius.
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.
“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.
"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.
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.
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.
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,
Though the first