by HAL MOUNTSAUERKRAUTEN, Alternate Reality News Service Court Writer
Having fins on our backs required humanity to rethink some of its most cherished ideas. The rules for Olympic swimming events had to be rewritten. Works by Rubens (Peter Paul, not just Paul), Michelangelo and other classic artists were Photoshopped to include fins, challenging what we thought we knew about physical beauty. The personal fin-care product market exploded almost overnight. We had to come up with new sex positions. The day 99 per cent of us grow fins is the day everything changes.
Three years later, police finally believe they know who is responsible.
"Jethro Dommasse III," Staff Sergeant Golkin Flever, resplendent in full riot gear, which is standard practice for press conferences since the Miami Debacle of '39, stated.
"Jethro?" said Luk Van Parijs, a high school phys ed lab partner of Dommasse III. "Are you serious? Jethro wouldn't be able to find his asshole with a hole in the ground!"
Staff Sergeant Flever was serious, serious as a heart attack. "Well," he said, "heart attack might be overstating the case. But, I am more serious than an upset tummy. How about...serious as...a middling painful gastrointestinal blockage? You know, the kind that may or may not require surgery - the doctor would like to wait 24 hours to see how it develops before making a recommendation? Yeah: I am as serious as a middling painful gastrointestinal blockage!"
Dommasse III had used a Baby's First Genetic Manipulation Kit (this week only - $9.99 on ehBay!) to create a virus that would be deadly to people whose DNA contained markers that indicated that they were not of the "white" race. He was disappointed when, upon releasing the virus into the atmosphere, blacks, Chinese, Latinos, Arabs and other minority members didn't immediately die painful deaths. He didn't know what to think when, a month later, just about everybody in the world sprouted fins.
This was well-documented on Dommasse III's Web site, Airhead Aryan Racial Pride. Why did it take the police three years to connect him to the fin epidemic?
"Internet was down," Staff Sergeant Flever tersely stated.
For three years? "Okay," Staff Sergeant Flever admitted, "you know, maybe...maybe we staked out the American Association of Retired Persons...for a couple of years. It was an honest mistake. Acronyms...well, acronyms can be confusing, sometimes. And, anyway, we got the right guy...eventually...anybody wanna argue with success?"
Watching Staff Sergeant Flever pound his fist with his truncheon, nobody appeared to want to argue with success. Or, his truncheon. Especially, his truncheon.
According to velvet-lined biologist Perini McFurbian, when Dommasse III released his virus into the atmosphere, he made two serious miscalculations.
The first was that the virus was not deadly, it just altered human DNA in a way he hadn't anticipated.
"Yeah, that sounds like Jethro," Van Parijs snorted. "His elevator doesn't go all the way up to the bats in his belfry, if you know what I mean."
We had no idea what Van Parijs meant, so we ignored him.
The non-fatal nature of Dommasse III's virus was probably for the best, McFurbian pointed out, since his second mistake was discovering that racial purity turned out to be a fairy tale not unlike Santa Claus, the tooth fairy or honest Wall Street executives. Although there are now small pockets of people who are not...finnish, the vast majority of the human race, having mixed ancestries, succumbed to the virus, including Dommasse III and just about everybody he knew.
"I could have told him he was about to make a terrible mistake," McFurbian said. "If he had asked me...and if I would have talked to him, which I probably wouldn't have - the racist sh*t. But, he didn't ask, so: fins on our backs."
People think our genes are like a steak, McFurbian explained. You might spice them up with a little sauce from the Caribbean, but you basically want them as pure and meaty as possible. In reality, however, because the races have so intermingled, our genes are like omelettes: you start with the basic eggs, then add some bacon bits from blacks, maybe a little oriental onion, perhaps some Latino tomato. And, some chefs like even more exotic genetic ingredients.
"Umm, if there are no more questions," McFurbian added, "I think I'm gonna go for lunch."
"That's my boy!" Dommasse III's father, Jethro Dommasse II, said with a prideful grin. "He...may not have gotten all of the details right, but he acted on what he believed in. He's a real Dommasse!"
Unfortunately, authorities are not sure how to proceed, since being a real Dommasse is not a crime. And, although releasing a DNA changing pathogen into the atmosphere is a crime now, it wasn't when Dommasse III did it. Officials are hoping to put him behind bars on six billion counts of assault, or possibly invading people's privacy. If that doesn't work, they hope to find irregularities in his tax returns.
The investigation continues.