Past Future Travesties of Confection and Science Part 1

This thing's almost 20 pages double spaced, so I'm not going to load that on you, my loyal possible two readers, so instead I'm splittin' it into segments.  Here's part one:
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            A wise man once told me, “You know, I like candy, and I like corn, but fuck that.”  Thorough research revealed an intricate story behind the history of candy corn – that monstrous culinary mistake – that can only be described as convoluted.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let me start from the beginning.

            Mad science is a hilarious sport.  No, wait, that’s not the right place to start, either. 

This story starts with Gareth Llewellan Garbesmond, a Welshman who did a stint in Germany, Japan, and the American Midwest.  Some people later claimed that Germany turned him evil, but those in the know understand that the American Midwest can corrupt a man’s soul faster than a shady fast food joint can serve you a slab of brown meat.  Llewellan – that’s what he went by, claiming his Welsh ancestry as a minority scholarship – traveled around mostly for scholastic reasons.  He was an engineer, a scientist, and a writer.  He wasn’t very good at the last one, but the evil genius’s always feel a need to record their vile deeds.

            Did I mention that this is the future?  Well, not our future.  A future.  You could maybe consider it our past.

            Llewellan was evil in a time/place/universe that didn’t really do evil.  Sure, they had scary movies (But not the Scary Movie series), haunted houses, and Asian martial arts, but war was unheard of.  Nations formed and split usually over a nice glass of Miracle Juice (“The Only Way to Imbibe Immortality!”), children played without bullying, and it was possible to get through the Department of Motor Vehicles in less than half an hour and, occasionally, with a smile on your face.

            This place was so peaceful that it was still just one, giant continent – Pangaea, if you will.  Even the planet didn’t fight.  The dinosaurs never died out.  It turns out that given just a few more generations of evolution, they evolve directly into either middle class businessmen or hippies.  They’re still the size of a two story house, but given a big enough keyboard, they’re still able to fill out reports, TPS coversheets and all.  Carnivores?  Cultivated tofu.  That’s right, lions started farming.  The continent that would have been known as Africa was the breadbasket for the world.  Sounds great, huh?  I might have lied about that tofu bit, but who knows what happens deep in the darkest parts of the Congo.

            Anyway, Llewellan became evil.  What caused this?  I’m glad you asked.

            Llewellan styled himself an inventor.  He was not, however, particularly skilled nor was he particularly scrupulous.  Stealing ideas from other inventors, though, was the work of the unimaginative.  Llewellan stole his ideas in plain sight – from the very things around him.  After redesigning a toaster to always burn toast, creating a mechanical bed/alarm clock that launched the occupant out the window, and creating a bathtub-safe hair dryer (It wasn’t bathtub safe), Llewellan began to feel a little discriminated against.  But he still had one last hope.

            During his stay in the American Midwest – Towns don’t matter, this is the futurepast, remember? – Llewellan became obsessed with the corn farms that stretched for miles throughout Possible Illinois.  For a short time he considered dropping his failing Invention Racket in order to pick up a career in Corning, but a marathon showing of the Children of the Corn movies gave him a phobia of farms as well as a nervous tic around children.  Wrenched away from his most desired calling, Llewellan began plotting.

            Llewellan wanted everyone to know the joy of corn.  Little kids, old folks, guys going through midlife crises, housewives, Siamese twins, and fanatical faux meat enthusiasts were all his target audience.  “But corn doesn’t market,” he would brood over a fine cup of corn-off-the-cob.  “I need to get it to the people.”

            Enter Jerebiah Dangall Crumps.  Once a farm boy, he left the homestead to pursue his true calling in marketing, a profession that had thus far been avoided in this serene, happy world.  Switzerland collapsed when these two gentlemen met up, heralding a significant number of our Norse mythology – Fenrir would swallow the sun and the world would be bathed in blood and battle – but all it signified in this alternate Norse mythology was that rabbits would breed especially well in the coming spring and the wise hunters would set up traps that preserved the integrity of the pelt.  Jerebiah had never quite hit his stride, always attempting to candy up his items.  The motto on his business card read, “If Candy Cain’t Fixit, People’re Dum!”  Llewellan was a poor judge of character and an even worse judge of talent.

            The resulting mixture was a kernel of corn coated in candy.  “It’ll be the chocolate covered cherry of the vegetable world!” they exclaimed.

            It wasn’t.

            The second attempt was candy coated popcorn.  The result was no better.  Finally they resorted to trickery.

            The pair realized that making a corn syrup worked, allowing the sugar and honey flavoring to mix in, creating something that doesn’t quite taste like any of the ingredients and causing people who haven’t wounded their tongue to make a slightly unpleasant face.  It turns out that Jerebiah was inbred enough to have a wonky taste structure and Llewellan burned his tongue during his trial phase of the bathtub-safe hair dryer.  They saw themselves as master chefs.

           No one else did.  This world was good, pure, and decent, and their Creation was evil, corrupt, and disgusting.  Switzerland, just getting back on its feet after the first collapse, recollapsed, sending the investors of the rebuilding effort into bankruptcy and destroying one third of the world’s sitcom producing countries.  Llewellan was unapologetic.  His genius deserved recognition, and this world wouldn’t give it to him.

            Delving deep into his old calling, Llewellan began crafting a machine capable of altering the world.  He wanted brains to be changed, electrons to be rerouted, and his glory to be a naturally known fact amongst his fellow beings.  Late nights in his basement became routine, and the candy corn stockpile continued to grow, the ever increasing mountain of orangish-yellow coal acting as fuel to his passion.  The Candy Cornium, the factory producing the substance, was raided and shut down by a newly formed group, Dinosaurs for the Ethical Treatment of Humans (D.E.T.H.), and Jerebiah fled to the basement sanctuary with his colleague.

            Months passed and the world tried to recover, and the sounds of hard work echoed throughout Llewellan’s basement.  Finally, the Day of the Great Reckoning, as it was marked on Llewellan’s Corn of the World calendar, came.  His work finished, he retired upstairs to clean himself up before being raised to the pinnacle of humanity.

            “Shock!” he exclaimed. “What has science done?!”  Llewellan’s months in darkness, lack of sleep and nutrition, and complete avoidance of basic sanitation had resulted in a gaunt, pasty, bespotted skeleton of a man with thin, wispy white hair and few teeth.  His eyes spoke depths of insanity, finally catching up with his brain and mouth in their insanity producing capacity.

            Llewellan wept, but his resolve hardened.

            “This world will pay for what it has forced me to become!” he shouted, shaking his fist at the mirror.  “They will hail me as their king! Ha!  Ha ha!  Gwa ha ha ha ha-hurk, cough, sputter!”  Popping a quick lozenge, Llewellan once again descended into his basement.

           

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            “Distinguished Gentlemen, I am about to unveil to you my masterpiece.  The machine that will change everything!”  Llewellan stood behind a makeshift podium, lovingly crafted out of three boxes of his mother’s Wishin’ Trolls, and had one hand grasping a dirty white sheet that hung from the rafters, concealing said masterpiece.

            Jerebiah was sitting in one of eight chairs, the rest taken up with elegantly written “Reserved” notices, one for each of the seven members of the World Council.  “But Lellan, I seen the machine.  I hepped bild it!”  Llewellan quickly shushed him and yanked the sheet down, showering himself in dust and dirt.

            Unveiled was a contraption that looked remarkably similar to a Tesla coil.  It was a seven foot tall tower with what might have been a disco ball on the top.  Circling the main pole below the ball were metal rings, slightly alive with the hum of electricity.  At the base was a control panel that would have looked at home in any science fiction B-movie.  From somewhere, Llewellan had donned a derby hat which did little other than to fluff his hair out horizontally.

            Llewellan gestured grandly toward the device.  “Behold!” 

Jerebiah beheld, and waited.  And waited.  Llewellan held his pose expectantly.  Jerebiah shuffled in his seat a little bit and cleared his throat.  Llewellan’s arm drooped a little bit as he grew more and more tired, but he troopered on.  Jerebiah pulled out a small packet of peanuts from a pocket and began to open them.  Finally Llewellan straightened up in a huff.  “Well?  Where’s the applause?”

“Oh.  Uh, I was gunna wait fer ye t’fire up that ma-chine.”  He popped a peanut in his mouth.  “But I can clap fer ya now, if it’s whatcha want.”

Llewellan sighed and hit a big, square, blinking, green button in the center of the control panel.  The humming stopped and was replaced with a crackle.  The rings leading up the pole began to emit tiny bolts of lightning a few inches long, eventually growing to connect each ring in a bridge of electricity.  The bridges expanded further and further up until reaching the ball at the top.  Once powered, aside from emitting disco lights, it began to spin, bathing the room in electricity and the ‘70s.  Time seemed to—

          – stop.

            And then it was over.  The electricity cut off, the lights stopped, and the gentle hum resumed.

            Jerebiah popped another peanut and clapped.  Llewellan tried to tame his frizzled hair and bowed.

            “Now, gentlemen, I shall call up the head of Candy Heaven Candy Stores, and let’s see just what he has to say about our corn now!”  Llewellan spun around and grabbed his phone from the podium.  Hitting number two on speed dial, he waited.  He made an impatient face.  He checked his phone for reception.  “Damn basement, ok, let’s reconvene… outside!”  He dramatically swooshed to the stairs and huffed his way up them.

            As he opened the door to his kitchen, his nose was assaulted with a foul stench.  Cursing the cryptic garbage pickup schedule and vowing to hire someone to take care of it after his rise to power, Llewellan slammed open the door and hit a baby raptor.