January 21, 2006

# 31b

[Foreword by the author: Hello there pilgrim. My name is Andy Kaufman. You've reached Middle Earth of Andy Kaufman's Hair. Well done on getting this far. If you're here to sample the thrilling second installment of a tale I like to call Woody, you've arrived with sails aflutter. If you're hoping of somehow sorting head from tail, try reading THIS first. It's the section of the story I loosely call Part I. Don't ever forget: mediocrity is anyone's bedfellow. - Andy Kaufman]


The rapidly approaching car from parts unknown was sending plumes of dirt high into the air when Woody estimated the time he had to act. Basing mental arithmetic blessed with fifty-three years refinement, he took into account the distance from ground zero and the height of the dust particles, reaching the sum of 120 km/h or near enough. The figure bounced between his ears. Land-generated contrails of such dimension were rarely seen in those parts, especially by man-made sources. Woody's awe was permanently decapitated when he realised through the use of every finger and every toe that he had precisely nineteen seconds to avoid potentially cataclysmic contact with alien entities.

'No time to waste,' he thought.

Instinctively, Woody denounced caution and assumed the breed of trouble to be of the most undesired kind; not otherworldly but governmental. The morsel of assumption had come from intricate knowledge of the road leading to and from the Harrelsons' remote farm setting. It was littered with potholes and layers of loose particles which made harmonious driving at high speed virtually impossible. Unless, of course, irregular means of propulsion were used, which only the government and a handful of neighbours living on fringes of society had access to.

Woody was impressed with the driver's skills to the point of being gassy.

Having exhausted a bare minimum of five invaluable seconds during an exchange between his bowels and the clean country air, he sprang into action upon thinking about Teri Hatcher.

His insides conspired with his ears, which bled, causing him to double over in excruciating pain. His voice returned to full cry the instant he shrilled the distress call of an animal disembowelled by invisible implements of torture. His ears bled steadily in small drops; falling onto the wooden roof as though impeded by time.

Internal blood pressure became intolerable causing his ears to spurt blood like a geyser of human DNA.

A second later, his ear drums shattered as his ears exploded. In their place appeared chrome teeth bound by stainless steel jaws. A titanium strip on either side of each jaw completed the fashionably appealing style of the new acquisitions. His cranial bones disintegrated into thin air, replaced by cybernetic parts convex in shape. His eyes imploded; two almond shaped forms of light illuminated by radiation in their place. Two titanium strips appeared at the outer edges of their circumference. They too looked fashionable. An additional set of teeth, larger and more ominous than the two sets gleaming where his original ears used to be, silently locked into position with a series of deft mechanical movements. They bore the same titanium strips as the other streamlined features, distinguished only by a dozen chrome rivets which had no functional purpose at all but perpetuated the futuristic feel.

In what was surely the epitome of intolerable self-torture brought on by bodily transformation, Woody's entire upper body mutated into a consensus of hardwired genetic wonderment: the vertebral column grew by two metres; the sternum, ribs and costal cartilages expanded threefold; the mandible grew in length and width directly proportional to the cranium; the clavicle, scapula, humerus, ulna and radius spontaneously extended and strengthened to the point of withstanding a nuclear detonation. Bone, tissue and cartilage had mutated into a solid construction of priceless hardware classified to eyes other than governmental. The entire upper region was bound by strategically positioned strips of titanium to add to the overall aesthetic appeal.

As Woody pivoted his neck to focus his precision robotic eyes to where wind gusts generated a spiralling effect, the computer brain now running the show deduced that five seconds remained for him to sound a warning.

He became incensed at mental images of his family perishing in a tsunami of bullets at the hands of undercover operatives. Hypersensitive instincts targeting the occupants of the car indicated the three men inside were trained assassins from a division of the government defence sector trained to deal with counter terrorism.

With his original lower half intact, Woody gave the outward appearance of an incomplete and highly classified experiment gone askew. He was all that and more. Woody was fully operational in Grievous Bodily Harm mode and prepared for an all-out war.

With a second left on what he surmised to be the countdown, internal mechanics automated high pitched modulation sounds at incomprehensible decibels. The landscape reverberated as waves of motion birthed by frequency and volume emanated from Woody's chest.

The barn collapsed to ruin under the stress; in several directions the earth cracked forming large chasms, one of which effortlessly swallowed the Harrelsons' house.

In the distance, Woody saw the car flung around several times through the air before bouncing to a halt several hundred metres from where it came.

And then there was silence.

Like moments following a natural disaster with catastrophic results, clarity and tranquillity announced the dawning of a fortune reversed.

Woody stood firmly on his muscular human legs. His upper body remained an acquired amalgam of priceless metals with the outward appearance of a science fiction project. His neck panned to the left, making mechanical sounds similar to a lubricated miniaturised conveyor belt. His non-human eyes witnessed a hand from the gaping hole where the Harrelsons' house had stood only seconds earlier.


[To be continued...Or is it? Remember: your vote counts. Vote 'Yes' for if you want this bonza yarn to linger and 'No' if you don't want it to end.]


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2 comments:

Ultra Toast Mosha God said...

This reminds me of the bit in Moonwalker where Michael Jackson turns into a robot.

Only better,

That film was truly terrible and I apologise for drawing comparison to it.

Sorry

Kaufman said...

I was aiming for something of that nature, with a bit of Australian outback imagery thrown in.

Let's see how it all ends.