The Banjo Players Must Die | Page 3

of Bavaria experienced some ethnic strife in the early twenty-first century, and it was quickly reprimanded by its neighboring countries for its manifest lack of originality.
In many unexpected ways, this desperate quest for a new form of strife influenced and transformed the global psyche. The longer the human race suffered the pestilence of unity, peace and harmonious coexistence, the more odious became the stench of desperation for destruction. Bad things simply stopped happening; in 1996, there had been 590 televised news channels broadcasting a nourishing and endless stream of meaningless and very satisfying destruction. In 2100 there were three, and they broadcasted for a total of three hours a day. Three hours, regurgitating historical footage of calamities and cataclysms and past conflicts as filler for what scant misery their reporters could find or fabricate. In 2100, it was possible for a citizen to go several months without the faintest excuse to get pissed off.
This unbearable state of affairs wreaked havoc on society. All novel forms of strife were attempted. Where such forms of strife contravened social mores and values, those values were loudly denounced. Moral nihilism sprung to the fore in no time at all, and for once humans adhered to the system of conduct which suited them best and simultaneously put them the least at ease.
But if history has taught us anything, it is that when things will look like they are going really well and really poorly all at the same time, this is when the angels start to meddle. And know that angels never meddle idly, and rarely ever with any degree of success.
It could only end in disaster.
The disaster was called Ramses, and Ramses was its name.
* * *
It is the custom (perhaps born out of bureaucratic ennui) that when new prophets arrive, a sign is given. Sometimes, these signs are declared retroactively and sometimes it seems like the angels are reaching just a little[The archetypal example is Jesus being born under a star. Under has absolutely no meaning when it is describing the relative position of a star versus a puny little human, for one thing. Under only has meaning on smaller scales: the remote control is under the angry woman being a good example. We don't normally say that this remote control is under a star since the star really isn't specifically over the remote control, it is just there. Stars lend themselves better to Cartesian coordinates, they don't make any sense with over and under and just beside. From a Cartesian perspective, one could easily say that anything is beside anything else, given the point from which one is observing this prodigious juxtaposition. For example, if I have full freedom of movement in all three degrees I can tell you that the sun is under your arse, which hopefully doesn't have to mean that your arse is a prophet.] .
Ramses Abasiri was born to Waldo and Mona Abasiri on the 28 of January 2445 at the Tiz Erd General Community General Medical Center[The Tiz Erd General Community General Medical Center gained notoriety for the controversial treatment they had developed for convicted sex offenders. The male sexual organ was removed and reattached to the patient's forehead; under this kind of arrangement, the blood drain inflicted upon the brain by an erection would immediately render the subject comatose. It worked rather well, of course.]. The maternity ward staff will recall his birth as the one where the mother suffered from the most violent spasms of flatulence while delivering; it was many months before jokes about `the malodorous fanfare announcing little Ramses' arrival' abated from the doctors' lounge. True however was that the stink had been so bad that no one had really been present to ascertain which precise orifice it was which little Ramses had emerged from.
At the tender age of four Ramses had single-handedly instructed the masculine half of his 47 kindergarten classmates in matters they shouldn't really have learnt until they could fit inside a condom - only the plodding advance of Mother Nature and puberty prevented any Little Willies from getting acquainted with anything more significant than the odd rodent. Even then, of course, without any measurable result apart from traumatizing the local squirrel population[Consider for a second how much more disturbing that sentence could have been had the expression `romantically involved' been in there somewhere. Right. You can stop considering now. Hey. Hey!].
Ramses' fascination with all the funny things he could do with his body led him, naturally enough, to the study of mathematics[If you don't understand what it is about mathematics which attracts people who are fascinated with their own beautiful bodies, then you are clearly not a mathematician. And If you are a mathematician and you still don't understand what beautiful bodies have to do with anything, then you