WHA? Part One

On January 1, 2035, at 12:00:01 AM, showing what was, in retrospect, a remarkable and ultimately telling observance of human convention and tradition, the Slizzeds, as they came to be known, were compelled by a force not yet wholly understood despite years of research and speculation, scientific and theological alike, to emerge through the left nostril, from where they had been living presumably to that point in time--i.e. inside the skull of every human on Earth, one Slizzed per human.  Every human except me, that is, but I haven't told anyone that yet.

Incidentally, to say "every human on Earth" back there was a bit misleading because Slizzeds also emerged from all the humans in space as well, meaning into the artificial environment of the joint Chinese-US Space Station orbiting the moon.  Curiously, all the space bound-Slizzeds almost instantly dissolved and evaporated right where they were floating in the zero-gravity atmosphere.  This was another, smaller mystery, which was clearly being overshadowed by the grander mystery of why small, newt-like creatures, with long, prehensile antennae and a highly developed grasp of the respective language of their host-human, had appeared jarringly and in every awkward way imaginable from noses hither and yon across the globe.  Test after test had been undertaken to determine what it was about space, or artificial air, or weightlessness etc. etc. that would prove utterly fatal to those Slizzeds which 'belonged to' the astro-humans of the space station, but to no avail.  Of course these tests had to be conducted diplomatically since all emergent Slizzeds stayed, mostly hiding in the hair (took some getting used to, believe me), with their host-humans.  Elaborate stories had to be concocted and improvised, mostly on-the-fly, about said tests needing to "get to the bottom" of the "disturbing" vulnerabilities the Slizzed 'race' had to certain environmental realities.  Really, if the scientists had been able to consult for half a second with each other, out from under the watchful eye of their respective Slizzeds, they surely would have fabricated an elaborate plot, inevitably involving the first-world military-industrial complex, to rid themselves, and indeed the rest of the world, of what they would have ultimately convinced themselves was an invading force, which would have been an absurd notion.  The urgency of the tests had taken on a different character as humans began to develop certain attachments to their own Slizzed and, of course, to those Slizzeds connected to people they truly loved.  This would prove to be a fortunate turn of events for reasons to be explained later (see Rule Prime below).

I alone knew the death of the space station Slizzeds had something to do with the highly-salinated, vitamin enriched, pre-packaged broccoli-paste the commander of the Chinese mission to the station had been eating all that fortnight, indeed eating with such relish that he had gone through the entire ship's complement of the stuff, save for the small bit hanging from its plastic packaging and floating among the assembled astronauts where the commander had lost his grip on it (the package) in a panic over the unnerving feeling of having a lizard crawl out of his nostril, coupled with the equally (and perhaps more) unnerving sight of lizards scampering from the noses of all those around him.  Ultimately this would be the last bit of broccoli paste in existence as the product had been discontinued by the private quasi-military multi-national conglomerate that made it in a single factory in the Xinjiang province and the packages sent to the space station were the last there were.  The small bit left hanging in the artificial air of the space station was itself extinguished in a ball of fire when the now-Slizzedless astronauts succumbed quickly to some unexplainable madness and initiated the self-destruct sequence of the station right before exiting, without spacesuits, through the aft-hatch, in single-file where they ruptured in the vacuum of space.

Again, I alone knew that the madness in the moon's orbit, and indeed ALL madness in the history of mankind, recorded or otherwise, had been caused by the death of the respective human's Slizzed, skull-bound in the case of 99.9% of human madness, and extra-cranial, in the case of the space station's astronauts.  Rule One - more like Rule Alpha - Rule Prime: If your Slizzed died, you died (and vice-versa, that is, if your human died, you'd best be in the market for a Slizzed-sized coffin [ultimately, though, the human skull filled in just fine for Slizzed burial]).  I knew all this because my Slizzed stayed behind--in my head, that is--and had begun to talk out loud to me, as it were, as opposed to the previously 'normal' (can we think anything is normal anymore?) human-to-Slizzed mode of communication, namely telepathy.  It had ultimately explained all these things to me, slowly, over time ('we' [I had begun to regard myself as having what could only be described as a multiple personality] had a lot time on 'our' (metaphorical) hands since 'we' rarely ventured out of doors, not wanting to draw attention to 'our'-selves by being the only living human without a Slizzed scampering on his or her person).

The first thing it said to me was my name.

"John."

I was jolted awake, startled.  Subsequently I would realize that I had gotten off pretty easy in this respect, only having a voice speaking a bit too loud in my head disrupting my sleep.  Billions had been awakened by what had been described variously as "the feeling like my nose turned inside out," or "you know that feeling when you get a really good blow on your nose? only this time it was like part of my brain popped into the tissue by mistake" or, and most colorfully, "it was like real bad diarrhea, except it was coming out of my face."

"Wha-" I said.  Well, I didn't actually say it as much embody the word mentally, spiritually, philosophically, what have you.  "WHA" was the complete feeling of ME, to ME, my entire gestalt, if you will, brought on, or at least so I thought, by a long night's sleep of fitful dreaming which followed a third-week-of-unemployment pot/whiskey/girl-on-girl pay-per-view debauch.  My stomach gurgled uneasily, my heart-raced and there was an unpleasant sphincteral urgency that I won't go into but all these things I came to understand were common side-effects to the so-called 'awakening' of Slizzeds around the world.  The fact that my 'awakening' took on a different character seemed to not make any difference.  Point is, the voice in my head was the least of my worries and I dismissed it as more of a lingering by product of the dream I was having and had been rudely awakened from.  But awakened by what?  Now the synapses were firing.