The crowd was covered in deep green chunks, the color of chorophillic vomit. “He’s never gotten sick before, I swear.” The small man in the white lab coat started wiping some of the green ooze off the naval officer’s jacket.

“Get off of me you bumbling idiot. I don’t know who or how anyone allowed you to get financing for such a stupid project, but I can assure you for the embarrassment you have caused me as well as the entire United States Navy. This program’s funding will cease.” The officer turned almost sliding on a giant bubble, but instead it popped like a teenager’s pimple casting a final insult into the face of Rubert. No one noticed as he was left wiping off his glasses.

“Did it even occur to you that that was important?” he asked. The scene pulls back, shifts, and comes close up on the President of the United States, a look of abject dumbstuckness on his face. He giggles. “I needed you to be on your best behavior.” Rubert dug into a drawer, taking out tiny bags of jujubes. “So, that’s were all those gummy bears went. You’re a bad president. A very bad president.” The president giggles.

His eyes stretched as large as his face in a blink designed to swallow the whole world. The sweat rolled down his face and pooled below his chest in the obese river formed by the fission of breast and stomach. He needed a glass of water. It had only been two years, he thought. He needed a glass of water. It was only just a break. Everything would pull together, he thought. He needed a glass of water. Rupert got out of bed and farted. He had eaten eggs for all three meals yesterday. Breakfast was an omelet, lunch was scrambled eggs, and dinner was birdie in the nest, his favorite. The room stunk like a funeral for a gangrened paper-mill. Rupert’s face lit up with pride.

“If I throw my entire weight onto the device maybe it could stop the thing?” he said aloud to the empty room. He held the cup of water up to the unshaded bulb and said a prayer to the oblong beaker. Tiny organisms engendered through filth, or should I say lack of cleaniness, began mating rituals as soon as they realized they were about to be imbibed. A great truth revealed, they fucked despite the potential for viable offspring. “Now if only there was a way to prove the existence of love?” thought Rupert as he drank. “If I could remove the pleasure sensors from them, provide them with foreknowledge of their death as well as that of their offspring, perhaps then, if they mated.”

“Why had the immaturity of the president threatened the Naval academy so much? Surly the disrespect of a child, especially one without responsible parents can’t be held accountable for their actions,” Rupert wrote, sometimes when he got his nightmares down on paper it caused them to go away. “Puerile actions engender death. The death motif lifts a smile to the mouth of any God fearing man,” he wrote. Rupert wasn’t afraid of God. He soon was back on the bed again, so tired his eyes were nailed shut.

The room was all wires and tubes, except for a small crib in the corner, blue for a boy. Actually the president had both male and female spores. When puberty first hit, he would play with himself for hours. Rupert became nervous, not just because of all the masteubatory spores, but because of a knock at the door. “Navel intelligence, open up immediately,” said a voice. What was going on? Yesterday wasn’t so horrible, he had proven that the president could develop a higher range of consciousness, perhaps the navy could use the technology. The armies of the world deploying the dim witted to the battle arenas of the world. Wrestle Mania XXIV would have been a sure thing.

Rubert opened the door. Four men entered, one of them was the officer who had been there for yesterday’s demonstration. “Gentlemen,” said Rupert, but they pushed him out of the way.

“Hold him,” said the captain. He walked straight up to the president’s crib. He began to wet himself and shake.

“What are you doing?” asked Rupert, frenetically.

“This study if formally cancelled,” he said. He picked the dripping president by his neck and showed him a galvanic flicker. How beautiful it spun, endless flashes of light, lambent sun, a vortex to the other side. The president shook. He wasn’t scared about what was to be done to him, he was scared that he had so fallen in love with the repetitive blade he knew he would have to be close to it. Was the blade his mother? The captain set the president on the ground in front of it.

Rupert screamed.

The president walked directly into the makeshift weedwacker.

The same verdant vomit shot onto the laughing face of the captain.

Another sweat, this time the whole bed was a seaweed pool of low thread count sheets. Rupert needed a glass of water. He drank.