The Historian by Hertzan Chimera It was a little black box just like they install on every passenger airliner these days, only this little black box really was black, black and non-reflective as soot. An ingenious apparatus designed to unite all the inhabitants of planet Earth under a single somnambulant umbrella. For many blood spattered moons, mankind had killed his brother and raped his sister in the honourable name of human conquest. Many had failed in their rout but a few had captained legendary campaigns worthy of note in the journals of the day. The occupants of this isolated planet are systematically, and without the honour of the ancients, subjecting their progeny to hour upon hour of bti - broadcast televisual insomnia. The grand opera of Civil War illuminates central Europe. Famines scour the United States from east to west. The Australasian subcontinent is tormented by exploding basalt lava fields 4000 kilometres across. Ultra violent sado-masochistic soaps are beamed from geo-stationary orbit. The nostalgic retelling of the Jewish occupation of Reichland. Pub culture impregnates the mind with poisoned fronds of despair. All the dirty colours of the evil rainbow saturate the collective retina. Planet Earth held captive an undersea rage of boiling savagery waiting to implode upon itself. But the worst was yet to come. Take me, for instance, a humble sort in many respects. It has been my great honour to nurture the little black box through its prototype birth, bugfix the teething troubles and soak test it to its current blend of marketable entity in eight hour shifts. The pay is good but the hours grow into brain-aching purgatories of meditation, balancing the little black box's resonance over such a vast spherical surface area. Its medium is a dense psychoplasmic web that is only visible to the most meticulously honed Sufi of Old India - like an evil mother's suffocating embrace, its sordid influence will ensure only clarity, purity and simplicity of thought will ravage the gore-addled synapses of planet Earth's maggoty inhabitants. On this Margotian Salvage Vessel they call me The Historian because I do all the species research, all the note taking and what have you. I share this vessel with two other engineers who put in their hours but in all honesty it would run smoother if I could run the whole show 24-7. I confuse them with my care, but we all need our dream state, our Nirvana. It is an interesting opportunity in many respects, to monitor a sentient life form meander round in the carefree somnambulism the little black box radiates, while all around them is atrocious war crime against all galactic convention. Cities of chrome and concrete are aflame all over planet Earth cloaking the sky in poisonous shreds of lilac organza. Great arms swoop down from altitude to scrape the land clean of all biology. Even the substrata is torn up like old carpet right down to the impermeable sea bed roasted by techtonic convention planes. The sea water (and all its nutrients) has long since been swallowed up into our aft cargo hold; this will fuel our entire return journey to Margotian space some seven light-jumps distant. And what a bounty, by any one's calculation. As always, before we depart this scorched planet core once called Earth, it is my solemn duty to switch off the little black box, returning the remaining humans to a fully conscious state as they choke to death from the numbing horror they witness. ***** THE END "Nominated for this year's PUSHCART PRIZE, Mike Philbin has been writing under the pseudonym Hertzan Chimera since about 1991 and has collaborated with the likes of MARK MCLAUGHLIN, D.F. LEWIS, MIKE KORN, PAUL PINN, GREG WHARTON, DAVID C KOPASKA MERKEL, DAVE MATHEWS, VANDA ASHANTE and more recently ALEX SEVERIN & WRATH JAMES WHITE. December 2001, ERASERHEAD PRESS released Hertzan Chimera novel SZMONHFU to rave reviews. Check out his website at: www.hertzanchimera.com"

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