He grimaced, projecting the force of his desire deeper into his entrails. The blood rushed in his ears, as he felt the pressure mount in his straining eyes. A second flood of pressure followed the first, as the spoil coaxed itself through the restrictive passage. An expiration, tinged with the heat of his passion, passed the abititious high school senior's tight lips. He stifled a groan, as the continuing exertion began to take its toll. A muffled splash signalled if not the end, nor yet the beginning of the end, at least the end of the begining of his toil. Were his ablutions but taken in the warm comfort of his home facility, he could at least find some relief in the relaxing pink hue of his mother's wallpaper--but here, in this industrial construct whose efficiency is plainly exposed with varnished steel and cold painted cement, his self-strife was amplified as were the suppressed grunts now echoing off the clinical walls.
Was this the correct choice? The ambitious high school senior had no option but to accept the choice as having been taken--he must pursue its course to the end. He relaxed momentarily, basking in the physical relief it proferred, but taking alarm in the urgent sensation at his extremity. He must redouble his effort if the ordeal were to conclude satisfactorially, so he again bent to the task.
His knees began to show flush, and his feet tingled as the harsh pressure against the backs of his thighs curtailed the circulation in his legs. He groaned again, louder now, not caring who may take offense. The force of his passion slowly, agonizingly crept lower. His eyes swelled, his breath came in rasps, his fingers clenched into a zombie rictus.
Glancing to his side, though he knew it was premature, the ambitious high school senior scoped his options upon completion. That was a mistake, he swiftly realized, as the urgency in his nether let fly a grotesque sound--leaving the confines of his control like a sickly, barking dog. The ambitious high school senior gasped in the fulsome depravity of his own stink.
"Dear, God," thought he, "let it end let it end let it end..."
His mantra became his only connection to humanity.
"Let it end let it end let it end," echoing like his forgotten heartbeat.
The projection lengthening below him creaked soggily--still clinging to its source like a different dog that does not run away, nor is sick, but rather slurps wetly at his master's cheeks. The ambitious high school senior coughed, forcing himself not to gag. He strained at his effort again, feeling the exertion pass swiftly now.
Tears welled in his eyes. Almost sobbing, he willed the passage ever faster until suddenly there was release, and the ghastly issue gently swept across his shiverring rotundity on its way to slap into its doom. His extremity puckered, withdrawing itself from the recent exertion.
Now with trepidation, the ambitious high school senior returned his exausted gaze to the barren fixture despensing the article he now needed. Nothing. The only possiblity at hand was a tattered and moldy cardboard placard displaying the remnants of a cigarette advertisement adhered to the aging plaster with hardened glue. Resigning himself to the harsh fate offered, he tore a piece of it from the wall, crumpled a length and passed it to his rear. It felt as if a stranger were accosting him in a most uncomfortable fashion as the rough material scraped its way through the clinging refuse. He peeked at the results of his task, repeating the grim procedure until his tenderness grew raw and stung with each application and bloody streaks mingled with the moldy crust covering the abrasive cardboard.
Although the refuse was still evident with each pass, the maroon streak now appearing amid the noisome foulness cautioned the ambitous high school senior that he must soon decide whether to remain soiled to protect his tenderness, or to press on until gushing gouts of agony flowed swiftly to join the disgusting heap below. He made a decision, rising to restore his trousers as he fought to avoid staring at the vast mound of bile-inducing reeking crap glistened in the bowl which crassly mocked the capability of the water-wise equipment to deliver itself of the foulness by its gross proportions.
Nonetheless, he rested his shaking fingers on the lever, and pressed. A gush of water, completely inadequate to the task at hand, ran over the surface of the enormous fetid mass and overflowed the brim of the porcelain fixture. Turning to run, the still loosened pants of the ambitious high school senior slipped down and tangled his dual tibias, sending him sprawling face-down admist filth and disarry. In horror he watched as the swollen mound of his own offal rose rapidly from the now trembling throne of waste like an enormous jabba-the-hut pudding. A face appeared, formed by the folds of feces and chunks of partially digested fast food, framing a ghastly mouth with lips that puckered and dripped as they lengthened towards his terrified visage...
In a flash, the stark decor vanished, replaced by the posters and litter of a room occupied by a typical ambitious high school senior. The smell remained, though, as did the ache in his rear. Either the more base sensations of touch and smell were able to overcome the pan-dimensional zombie shift, or he had actually crapped in his bed and wiped on an afghan his mother had crocheted. Staring disbelivingly at his foul bedding, he slowly realized that the foul bedding was that which he had hertofore believed he would never again rest amid--for it was back in his own room, presumably 30 years before the shitting scene described above took place.
The ambitious high school senior groggily looked around his familiar bedroom, and sighed with relief, rubbing the zombie stare out of his eyes.
"It was all only a dream," he sighed with relief. Again.
THE END
The ambitious high school senior selected the PRINT command and stood up from the chair that faced his computer's flat panel display. The wireless keyboard rested on the edge of the desk and the computer itself was a box on the floor under enough soiled clothes to strain the cooling fan. Most of the desk was covered with textbooks, paperback novels, notebooks, and CDs. From the mounds he extracted his textbooks and packed them into his backpack. Hot out of the printer, he grabbed his English assignment, slid it into the pack and rushed off to school.
He had not the slightest concern about how his teacher would respond to this essay. The conventional Ms. Toulvey had long before exhausted her vast collection of complaints. She now apparently thrived on his stories that described the horror and filth of zombie existence. Maybe she would greet him again with a smile and say, "What surprise do you have for me today?"
Two months earlier she had written on one of his first essays, "Please see me after school." She had suggested counseling. He had refused. She had asked if his father was abusive. He threw that back at her and asked how often her father had abused her. After a few more weeks they both realized that they could survive the school year only by accepting a truce. From then on she simply corrected his grammar.
The ambitious high school senior shook his head in order to try to remove from his thoughts the memories of those past weeks of intense conflict with his teacher. He had to share his dreams with someone in order to keep his sanity. Ms. Toulvey had the misfortune of being conveniently at hand.
The school building was now visible in the distance. He stamped his feet as he walked, trying to gain proof that the world was real. Which was more likely, that his brain could not tell the difference between reality and dreams or that it was possible to know the future? The third alternative, that his brain simply created amazing dreams was an idea that he was well aware of, but it was an idea he could not accept. No, these were no ordinary dreams. These were either future memories or signs of deep mental illness, so he assured himself. The answer seemed to lie in waiting to see if he ended up in a mental hospital or living the bulk of his life as a half-dead abomination.
The problem, he reflected as he gathered his frayed wits to some semblance of humanity, Is I am consumed by my ambition.
He beheld the ghastly work of fiction he had produced. He shuddered to remember the fearsome visage that had risen from the crapper. Its gaping maw had spread to engulf him, threatening to engulf him bodily in the fearsome monstrosity.
What a load of crap.
The ambitious high school senior withdrew from his reverie. He struggled to focus his spinning mind. Wedding band, he glanced at his finger, old ass fingers. Coarse grayish hairs jutted from the gnarled stalks. Zombie fingers?
He chuckled to consider what a wreck his poor memory had become. A warm trickle crept from his temple. Pawing the source, he jostled the construct of wire and flash memory amaturishly piercing his skull.
Like the movie Momento his existance zombie flashed to another date at the impetus of the rough handling delivered to his plasto-scientifico-mind-meld thing in his head. Earlier? Later? He hardly gave a damn at this point. Linden trees swayed overhead. The whispered chatter of leaves filled his ears with peace. The linden drops a lot of litter, and the ambitious high school zombie accordingly was obliged to draw broken branches and dried material from his path in order to progress. But where was he headed? He looked toward the sun, its light filtered though the linden's green. Innatentive to his path, he barked his shin against a jutting branch.
30 years--that's a hell of a duration to lose for one's ambition. A philosipho-zombie has no cause for complaint, but Jesus. His hand now felt the slippery cerebrospinal fluid between his fingers. He tried it on his tongue.
Sweet. What did that remind him of?
Total Recall differed from some of the more common "what the fuck happened to the last 30 years stories" in the sense that Arnold intentionally brought it on himself. Another story of the same bent was Zaphod Beeblebrox, who, wishing to apply himself to the Galactic Presidency needed to mask his alterior motives from those who frowned at motives of any kind--including himself, cauterized the chunk of his brain responsible for conceiving of the Big Picture.
The ambitious philosipho-zombie paled further to think of a mind capable of understanding the Big Picture.
Skull piercings[]
The ambitious high school senior tried to remember what life was like before he got his brain implant. Those days Before seemed a blur of television addiction. By the time he had finally reached the legal age for skull piercing it was no longer hip. The anti-electrostim backlash was already in full swing so that roughly ten percent of the television commercials had been selling electrode implants and a similar number were for electro addiction treatments.
Of course, he still loved the music of the happy-go-implant-me days.
electroengorge me, my vice mail is full
temporal lobe stim script, three gigs full
amygdular degenerate, thats very degenerous
polyencephalitis, my flash makes it humorous
He had selected a brain implant that would stimulate his pleasure centers every time he did school work while inducing pain if he wasted time watching television. He needed the week of special training that was included in the electroimplant package deal. That week had been filled with biofeedback sessions with the implant so that he could learn to use a computer monitor while still being unable to watch television. Eventually his doctor had found the correct parameters for the memory chip that controlled his multielectrode array. He self-consciously fingered the memory chip where it rested under his hair and tried to guess which of his fellow students had their own implants.
As advertised, the electrode array had turned him into an instant ambitious high school junior. That was only last year, but his pre-skull piercing self already seemed to merge into a jumbled blur with the pop culture icons of his childhood. Now the child that he had been existed in his memory as tattered fragments that were hard to distinguish from the memory remnants of some 8 episode reality show he had once seen.