by SASKATCHEWAN KOLONOSCOGRAD, Alternate Reality News Service Philosophy Writer
Englebert Calliope is dead, but he’s trying to not let it ruin his day.
“Me shingles’re actin’ up summit fierce,” Calliope said. “But if this be death, I kin live with it.”
Calliope was driving to his local MultiMaxiMegaMart for industrial bins of weasel chow (he didn’t have any pets, but he could never pass up a sale – his house was filled with boxes full of corn flakes, remaindered books and paintings of babies’ arms holding apples – he…he should really seek help for this) when he was pulled over by a policeman for having so many stickers on his car (including but not limited to professing his love for beef jerky, seventeen different rainbows, and proclaiming Charlie Brown shall rise again – oh, yeah, he should definitely get help) that his licence plate could not be read. After checking Calliope’s ID, the policeman charged him with DWD.
“Well, I never!” Calliope commented. “Not even twice on Sundays!”
I had never either, so, after a prodigious amount of research (a whole thirty seconds on Gaargle – that’s like twenty years in real life!), I can say without fear of flying or contradiction that DWD is an acronym for Driving While Dead.
“Ya whu? I thought ta meself,” Calliope stated. “I ain’t rightly never heard of such a thing ever in my lifetime!“
Despite containing more negatives than a Republican Presidential hopeful, Calliope’s meaning was clear: what the hell was going on, here?
“Couldn’t have bled it better meself,” he enthusiastically agreed using cockney rhyming slang. At least, I hope he was using cockney rhyming slang.
“The whu is actually not that difficult to understand,” explained Evanescent P. Legume (the middle initial is so that people will differentiate her from the other Evanescent Legumes in the government phone directory), Vice Chair of the Steering/Staring What’s the Diff Committee of the federal Ministry of Yentas. “We have bought M.O.R.T. and have deployed it throughout the government. We cannot be blamed for any lack of whu on the part of the public.”
M.O.R.T., which stands for Mortality Operator for Retiring the Tendentious, is a computer program that calculates how long a person can be expected to live. It bases this assessment on a variety of factors, including, but not limited to (although it is trying to cut down): weight, height, driving skills, propensity to run down hallways holding scissors, shoe size (duh!), diet, willingness to split up the party in a haunted house, and eagerness to try new experiences.
“As the overseer of taxpayer money,” Legume explained, “we have an obligation to ensure that government funds are not given to dead people. There are, after all, a lot more of them than there are of us – it would bankrupt the country in no time round!”
Did she mean no time flat? “Inflation!” Legume sourly remarked.
“I’m not dead yet!” Calliope squeaked.
“If M.O.R.T. says you’re dead, who are you to argue?” Legume responded. “Honestly, if citizens aren’t prepared to conform to government expectations of their mortality based on computer algorithms that are far too complex for them to possibly understand, what is keeping us from descending into anarchy?”
Chagrined (he had an easily amused cha), Calliope allowed, “I could be a little dead. You know. Around the hedges.” (That was cockney rhyming slang for “edges.” Unless it was cockney rhyming slang for “ledges,” which could lead to one’s death if one wasn’t careful. Or “sledges,” which can be dangerous to the health of grandmothers. Or, “pledges,” which…means nothing in this context. Cockney rhyming slang can be inscrutable that way.)
“We’re dying since the day we were born,” said famed filosopher Sam Roberts. “So, technically, M.O.R.T. has a point. As we get older, the percentage of factuality in the computer’s calculations increases. Somebody who is sixty years old when the average life expectancy is eighty could be considered seventy-five per cent dead. Death is not a binary, yes or no state.”
“I’m no filosopher, famed, fidgety or fosphorous,” Calliope mildly retorted, “but I kind of feel like it is.”
What was it like being dead? Calliope sniffed. “It’s a lot like spendin’ an hour in Oshawa.” If there were any justice in the world, he would have died of shame that very second for telling such a hoary old joke.