THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
012
WARREN ELLIS


Welcome to planet Earth.

A California fisherman pleads guilty in court to stabbing a sea lion through the heart with a steak knife because it tried to steal his bait. Around the same time, 18-year-old Emily Sander disappears from a Kansas college, probably in the company of a 24-year-old man and his 16-year-old pregnant girlfriend. Her corpse is found in the tall grass off Highway 54 a few days later, by which time it's been revealed that Sander was also an internet nude model using the name "Zoey Zane." Somewhere nearby, there's a motel room full of blood. Her ex-boyfriend -- who dumped her when she started doing the topless stuff -- said of her, "She wanted to choreograph music videos. That is the only reason she did the Internet thing -- to get a little exposure."

There's a hole in the universe a billion light years across, called the Cold Spot. According to theoretical physicist-cosmologist Professor Dr Laura Mersini-Houghton, the hideous gaping void from beyond space lurking in the constellation Eridanus is "the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."

In North Carolina, scientists have driven electrodes into the brains of monkeys, analysed the specific signals sent down the nerves for leg movement, and then driven them over the net to a pair of robot legs in Kyoto. The monkeys make the robot walk. This is not the same robot that's been constructed to feel pain. Simroid, in Tokyo, is a robot used to train dentists. It breathes. When a student presses its teeth too hard, or slips with a tool, it twitches with pain and exclaims in spoken language.

Elsewhere in Tokyo, technicians are nursing baby robots. Robot babies that cry and burp and probably shit oil and broken cogs. They're designed to help teach prospective human parents what to do with babies in a society with a birthrate falling so hard that "opportunities to see kids in society are decreasing."

Welcome to planet Earth, where, within a few years, we will all have been entrained to raise robot babies that we have designed to feel pain. Soon, they will reach their toddler years, powered by a vast array of monkeys wired up to the internet. We will send them out into the world, where they too will go on to the internet and show the world their chrome nipples and the sleek pink hatches of their robot vaginas before being shanked to death in motel rooms by vengeful, pregnant sea lions.

And, across the vast expanse of spacetime itself, an entire other universe is showing us its billion-light-year-wide arse.

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I opened my new message board the other day:
Whitechapel. All are welcome. Don't piss on the floor.