Nathan the Non-Descript

His teal and honeysuckle yellow spaceship cutting through the dark void of space between his home on Mars and his University on Earth, Nathan Paxton looked about the vast piece of consumer goods which sheltered his wet little human body from having all the blood boiled out of it. As spaceships go, this one was alright. The on board AI which ran everything had a few tenacious pieces of ad-ware wedged in it, but otherwise did a competent job of helping Nathan out by facilitating all sorts of functions. It did everything the catalogue had promised – such as being able to record Nathan’s thoughts directly onto the inter-trans-pan-galactic-o-net. Turning to the microphone, Nathan seemed to recall that this process had once been referred to by some offensive term known as “bogging” or maybe “lerging”….at least until the great Minutia War in which a monomaniac by the name of Oliver Brackenbury had ignited galactic conflict for the express purpose of changing terms which got on his nerves.

Brackenbury’s campaign had been a long and strange one whose pinnacle had been the herding of every individual who misused the word “theory” in their arguments through a long tube – the wrong end of which lay in a six mile deep pit filled with rampaging, thick necked, salivating Coulter-Beasts. Conventional forces were unable to stop him but eventually a brave resistance cell cobbled together an ingenious plan. Utilizing the expertise of several physicists, cyberneticists and deus ex machinists, the resistance constructed a cunning trap for First Citizen Brackenbury (As he had eventually dubbed himself). A prosti-bot that was able to change its density and weight at will, in a range from 120 lbs to the approximate weight of Iceland. After being smuggled into his private chamber, the robot had set about crushing the First Citizen's pelvis into fine, pink and white powder when the opportunity had presented itself. Recalling this historical detail, Nathan exhibited the natural reaction of his gender by instinctively shivering in horror at the image.

Yet this paled in comparison to the archival footage of the First Citizens cremation. A handful of file photos revealed that before his crusade, Oliver Brackenbury had been a slender young man – somewhat over six feet tall and a shade under two hundred pounds. But within the first week of his biblio-fascist regime he had swollen to 450 pounds and, mysteriously, grown a foot taller. When the Firemen came to douse his body in napalm, they discovered that he had swollen to approximately two metric tons in weight and was roughly the size of a modest cottage. A cell sample, taken just before the burning, revealed that his every cell membrane had become utterly saturated with a strange cocktail of brandy, vodka martinis and righteous indignation. This is suspected to be the reason that his body, lit some five hundred years ago, continues to burn to this day and has been harnessed to provide electricity for several million home entertainment systems across the Earth.

“Sometimes a man just has to do what needs to be done” he said to an empty bridge “There, that’s suitably authoritative without really saying anything”. Nathan was trying to think of what to do when his author rapidly lost interest in his current situation and decided to scrap the story. Nathan wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve being tossed into literary limbo or to be the subject of such ham-fisted post-modernist tripe…but here he was, frozen in amber (and grey matter), floating somewhere between thoughts of what the author was going to cook for dinner tonight and a dormant flashback to a particularly callipygian young woman he’d seen on the tube three weeks prior. His eyes boggled at this strange fate, but only because the image amused the author as he allowed Nathan one final thought.