The Cream

The Cream

I was visiting friends back in the US, when one of their teenage kids yells out, "Hey Uncle Corbs, check this out!" He'd been surfing around Google on his wall-sized monitor. Google now had search rights to 100s of different sectors in the solar system, so you can imagine the amount of information (and junk) which was now available.

"This is cool! It's some ancient formula for making carbon atoms reverse date!"

I thought about that for a second. Sounded like a possible business plan. "Where's that from?" I asked.
"Says here, some where in Sector 31, Gamma District, Planet Vesuvius."
"Where the hell is that?"
"Not too far, about 80 years away by light craft."
"So that must mean no copyrights..." I said. I cracked my knuckles, sat down at the keyboard, and started digging deeper.
"Colin, I knew you were a smart kid."

Colin was my old friend Christopher's son, and for him there was no delineation between digital and anything else. His generation lived Star Trek, while we just watched it on TV. I told him to always keep a look out for cool stuff that we could make some money off of. There were too many ideas out there, I told him. We just needed one to score it big.

Somewhere in the vaults of a patent library on Vesuvius, hundreds of years ago, someone had engineered a formula that reversed aged carbon molecules.

People and animals were made of carbon, so theoretically, applying some of this formula on a living being would make them younger... The thought of this had me up for weeks, trying to dig through the weird Vesuvius patent library to get the actual equations. Vesuviun math and chemical mapping were also different than our's so I had to use endless combinations of language convertors, math filters, and periodic table convertors to generate a readable and usable Earth-like formula. The Bablefish Translator did a pretty good job.

Finally I had it. It looked like this:

Molecular Formula: C11H12O
Molecular Weight: 160.215
IUPAC Name: 2-Ethylindan-1-one
CAS Number: 22351-56-0
NMRShiftDB: 20292
Spectrometer: Vesuvian Mercury 200 MHz
Solvent: CDCl3
Sample Concentration: Unknown

After weeks in a lab, we finally ended up with a kind of white lotion which we tried rubbing on practically everything. It worked on auto dents, restoring them to pre-dent perfection. It worked on restoring any type of leather, fabric, window, or wall. Some adventurous men rubbed it on their penises. Just a little, and the penis was again full of teen aged urgency. A little too much, and some guys missed the mark, restoring their penises to tiny little baby penises. They'd have to wait 15+ years for a usable penis again. Women all wanted to rub a bit of cream on their neck lines and around their eyes. Some tried it on their breasts and bottoms. It worked amazingly. Our middle aged friend's circle were suddenly filled with women who were 40+ but looked like they were nineteen. It was sometimes very unsettling. People loved it.

We rubbed the lotion on a variety of animals as well. Dogs were transformed into pups, birds into chicks, rabbits into bunnies.

I was about to go public with this incredible new "Anti-aging cream," when I received a disturbing cease and desist letter via email. It was addressed to my Earth IP, and written in binary. Someone/thing on Vesuvius had found out about our patent library raiding, tracked my IP, and followed up with a cryptic letter:

010001010110000101110010011101000110100000100000010101000110100001
101001011001010110011000111010000011010000101000001101000010100101
100101101111011101010010000001100001011100100110010100100000011001
100110111101110010011001010111011101100001011100100110111001100101
011001000010000001101110011011110111010000100000011101000110111100
100000011101010111001101100101001000000110110101111001001000000111
000001100001011101000110010101101110011101000110010101100100001000
000110100101101110011101100110010101101110011101000110100101101111
011011100010111000100000010000110110111101101110011100110110010101
110001011101010110010101101110011000110110010101110011001000000111
011101101001011011000110110000100000011000100110010100100000011100
110110010101110110011001010111001001100101001011100000110100001010
000011010000101001000010011011000110000101110100011010000110111101
101110001000000101011001110010011010010110010001101011011001010111
00100110110101101001011000110000110100001010

Binary Translation:

Earth Thief:

You are forewarned not to use my patented invention. Consequences will be severe.

Blathon Vridkermic

This was a shocker. "How far away did you say Vesuvius was?" I asked Colin. Of course I hadn't mentioned this to his parents yet.
"About 80 years by light craft," he said.
"Is there anything faster than that," I asked.
"Not on Earth."
"But could there be, somewhere?"
"I dunno, maybe, but how could we possibly know?"

This was not a good thing. I'd apparently pissed off someone on Vesuvius, who knew where I was, and the last thing I wanted was a pissed off Vesuvian, whatever they looked like, to knock on my front door. I could make billions with this new cream, and now I was a bit scared.

Next step was of course to Google "Blathon Vridkermic." What I dug up was not pretty. Blathon Vridkermic had just been released after 300 years on a Vesuvian penal colony.

And he looked like this.

A little more research on "Vesuvius" and "Blathon Vridkermic" revealed some scary facts. First, Vesuvians were an advanced scientific and farming race which survived on the enzymes in blood products. They were essentially what we called vampires. Vegetation could no longer grow on their planet due to some solar flares, therefore they couldn't farm animals any longer. In order to survive, they were forced to create synthetic food sources.

Second, Blathon Vridkermic was apparently a pretty smart guy, and he didn't like eating fake food chips. He wanted good old blood, and an obvious leap was to look around the galaxy for cheap blood sources. Earth was only 80 years away. Since Vesuvians lived a long time 80 years wasn't a problem. So he apparently started coming to Earth to gather up hundreds of hapless humans to ship back to Vesuvius so they farm us and feed off of our blood. His first trip didn't work out too well since Blathon Vridkermic didn't know that humans only lived about 80 years. They all died. His second trip involved cryogenics, which was complicated and costly, and it turned out that humans didn't thaw out very well. They all died too.

Blathon Vridkermic apparently was getting very tired of making wasted 160 year long trips to the supermarket, so he sat in his lab and thought the problem through, and deduced that since humans were essentially carbon byproducts which had a shelf life of about 80 years, he needed to find a way to reverse the aging of carbon so that a load of humans could keep fresh for 80 years while shipped to Vesuvius. Apparenly Blathon Vridkermic's plan was to come to Earth, pick up a load of humans, rub them down with the cream, turn them into little babies, then pack them off for the 80 year trip back. I'm sure along the way he would keep rubbing them down with reverse carbon cream every 20 years or so to keep them fresh.

It turned out that trafficking humans on Vesuvius is illegal, and Blathon Vridkermic was arrested and sentenced to 300 years in a penal colony. He never actually got a chance to use his formula. This was the same formula Colin had found in the Vesuvian patent library, the formula I had produced and was about to make billions off of.

The problem now was, in 300 years, the Vesuvians probably figured out a lot faster way to travel around the galaxy, and it was my guess that Blathon Vridkermic was probably on his way back to Earth to herd up some humans. And now he had my email address.

Then I woke up.

Posted to Dreams by corbett at 02:22 PM
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