Dear Amritsar,
Do you remember the episode of Star Blap, TOS (The Original Series, although some people refer to it as Terrifyingly Obvious Suckage) where two aliens went to war because the patterns on their faces were slightly different? Oh, sure you do – Frank Gorhsin played both characters. Frank Gorhsin, you know – Frank Gorhsin? The man with the most annoying giggle in Hollywood? And, in the end, it gave Captain Jamison T. Pompous a chance to look soulfully into the camera and over-emote about the foolishness of human prejudice? Oh, come o – how is it possible that you are not familiar with that episode?
Okay. You were raised by cannibals. Well, there was an episode of Star Blap, TOS (which still other some people think stands for Testosterone Orchestrated Snoozefest – human beings can be so cynical about other people’s pleasures, can’t they?) where two aliens went to war because the patterns on their faces were slightly different. And, it’s wrecking my wedding day.
I should probably explain. I met Fender Stratocast in Virtuous Muskrat, a city in the centre of Blaisdell’s Brazil. Yes, I know that in a computer-generated reality, every point is the centre of the universe, but geography was never my strong point. Or, logical consistency. I thought I was an old hand, having uploaded my consciousness a century earlier, but I was a mere babe compared to Fender, who had lived in BB for over six hundred years.
When we met, he had the body of a giraffe with feet of clay (for better traction on glass roads) and a head consisting of Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 2: Cadmium to Baroque. I was a tree. I thought I was majestic at 15 feet tall, with branches that swayed over 10 feet across at my crown, but Fender scoffed that the cellulose I contained would barely make 100 pages of his head.
It was love at first slight.
Our courtship lasted 17 years – you don’t have to be in a hurry when you can live forever…or as long as the power to the servers holds out. We went through many phases (including amoebas, gaseous vapours – which, as you might imagine, made us very popular with our friends who still had scent sensitive body parts – and politicians made out of silly putty), but decided it would be romantic to be wed in human bodies. We had both been fans of Star Blap, TOS (which even more other some people called Total Orange Snogfest, even though it was only the one episode!), and thought it would be sweet to reference an episode in our ceremony.
In the TV show, one side of the each character’s face had a dragon with shiny purple scales and three princesses with lines crossed through them on its flank; on the other side was a field of small yellow fleurs de lis set against a background of grimy, 19th century London. Simple designs, really, but it still came as a shock when the audience realized that they were on different sides of each of the character’s faces.
Fender wanted to have the dragon on the left side of his face because it was his good side. The problem was, so did I. We argued about it for weeks. Then, my pet ocelerret Barbarella was killed by a virus that made the code from the different animals that went into it reject each other. Well! I wasn’t going to stand for that! I tampered a bit with his code so that his face was dominated by a pair of giant lips. Try to kiss him, and you could get lost in those lips for weeks – literally! Then, just yesterday, he introduced something into my virtual body that makes my fingers the consistency of spaghetti! Fender! Did that to me!
Should I laugh this off and let Fender have his way, or should I make his condo unit sink through all of the ones below it and into the ground, never to be seen again?
Lettie Dedd-Ayres
Hey, Babe,
People who upload their consciousnesses to computer-generated realities really have too much of time on their hands, don’t they? And, when I say they, I really mean you. So, don’t you? Really have too much time on your hands?
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service’s sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: My parents weren’t cannibals! They preferred to think of themselves as “differently dieted.” And, yes, that was part of the joy of spending the first 14 years of my life in a jungle in an undisclosed South American country. But, my childhood was no different than anybody else’s, really, except for the occasion piranha in the swimming hole and the dysentery.