Estragon, Existential Space Commando

I'll get the less entertaining part out of the way first, as I imagine it will only enhance what follows.

As a final assignment in the same acting class I mentioned in the last post, we had to act out a scene from a famous play entitled Waiting for Godot. Here's the play in a nutshell: two bums, Estragon and Vladimir, both whom have slightly lost their minds, gibber about in the middle of nowhere by a tree, and are faced with a severe existential quandary. They continually forget things and have bizarre, often unintelligible conversations. The most concrete thing about the play is that they're apparently waiting for a man named Godot, who is commonly interpreted by viewers as a personification of the "meaning" to their existence. Of course, (SPOILER ALERT) the guy never shows up.

As part of the assignment, I had to contrive a character background for the guy I was playing in my designated scene, who happened to be Estragon. Since the play says next to nothing about the main characters' backgrounds, I took my liberties with it. ENJOY!

Estragon
Character Analysis

Estragon was born Estragondrus-19 in the year 2293 aboard a Type-8 Orion Alliance Infantry Cloning Station, orbiting the planet Galactigus Nine in the Tau Ceti system. As the nineteenth clone of one of the Orion Alliance’s most elite space commandoes, Estragondrus-19 emerged from his replication tubule a natural born soldier and killer. While he was gestating, a scene from the late 20^th century summer blockbuster hit, The Rock, was subliminally channeled into his ocular and auditory nerves over and over again. This scene involved a large black man accosting Nicolas Cage with a knife and saying, “I gon’ take pleasure in guttin' you… boy.”

The artificial amniotic fluid had barely been washed off when the station came under attack by a fleet of Deathcruisers, sent by the Coalition of Kargon. At the first impact of a neutrino missile, Estragondrus’ subliminal space commando programming kicked in, and he leapt into an escape pod. By hacking the pod’s autopilot computer, he managed to redirect the tiny spacecraft on a collision course with a particularly weak area of an enemy ship’s hull, the location of which, like so much other knowledge of the enemy, had been programmed into him before birth.

The particular vessel which he happened to collide with was in fact the enemy fleet’s flagship, and the escape pod actually crashed into the Admiral’s quarters, where Admiral Blotcroch was engaged in a Kargonian mating ceremony with one of his many concubine larvae. The ship’s automatic force fields activated to prevent a decompression event, but by that point it was too late: the one man killing force that was Estragondrus was already aboard. Leaping from the ruined pod (still completely naked as people tend to be shortly after being born), he quickly landed a decisive kick to Blotcroch’s Jergrubular Lobe, the most vulnerable part of the Kargonian anatomy. He did this even before Blotcroch could remove his igraculous from his concubine’s larandranon. The maneuver caused the Kargonian Admiral to light on fire and explode into gooey little bits, which of course, due to the nature of Kargonian collective consciousness, caused all other subordinate Kargonians within twelve parsecs to immediately light on fire and explode as well. This dealt a serious blow to the evil Coalition of Kargon, and within two months, the Kargonians offered their unconditional surrender to the Orion Alliance.

This is how, at the age of 38 minutes, Estragondrus-19 became humanity’s number one hero. The Interstellular Senate awarded him three of the highest honors that one could earn in service of the Alliance, including the Senatorial Medal of Jergrubular Lobe Exploitation, which is awarded to soldiers who successfully land a punch or round-house kick to a high ranking Kargonian’s Jergrubular Lobe (limit one per person, void where prohibited).

While it was a policy of the military that no clone soldier ever meet his originator, the original Estragondrus, who had retired from service a decade before and changed his name to Vladimiroid to hide his identity, came out of the woodwork and insisted that he be allowed to meet his heroic twin. Given the circumstances, a military tribunal decided to make an exception to their policy, and allowed the two to meet in a heartfelt ceremony atop the Eiffel Tower in France, the capital of Earth, where they stood hand in hand far above heaving masses of revelers. Many were surprised and befuddled by the fact that, though they were clones, the two didn’t look all that similar.

The pair became fast friends, and together they opened their own restaurant chain, Low Orbit Fondue, a series of family oriented fondue restaurants positioned in geosynchronous orbit over such galactic hotspots as Earth, Tau Ceti 8, Beevonius 12, Jupiter’s moon Io, and of course Uranus. They also had a small drive-in-only location in south Detroit. Low Orbit Fondue gained particular notoriety thanks to their unique Zero-G Tuesdays, on which any diner could request to have his or her booth’s gravity generator disabled, allowing them to sample fondue from a giant bubble of floating fondue as opposed to a fondue pot. Fondue!

Then, disaster struck. It all began when humanity made first contact with an irritating yet admittedly friendly race of aliens called blukbluks. The newfound extraterrestrials immediately displayed a penchant for traveling about in huge spacebus loads to tour the new and fascinating human corner of the universe. Typically during this period, any establishment that they found interesting would often wind up overrun in the blink of an eye as they swarmed about and took transdimensional photos (which tend to induce nausea in most humans) of even the most mundane objects, and excreted large amounts of flatulence due to their inability to properly digest human food. Furthermore, they seemed to have no concept of currency exchange or tipping for that matter, and usually insisted upon paying for their meals and souvenir trinkets in “Blukbucks.” Estragondrus, following one particularly harrowing blukbluk raid on his restaurant during which he vomited eight times as a result of exposure to blukbluk “photo opportunities,” was heard to have said, “I fucking hate blukbluks.”

One day, during a particularly nasty influx of blukbluk tourists, a doddering older blukbluk with pink hair decided to order the curry dish. Normally the smell of curry was offensive to the average blukbluk, but this particular specimen had lost her sense of smell in an accident involving a photocopier, and so decided to “go out on a limb.”

To make a long story short, the isometric alkaline compounds found within the curry caused a quantum waveform collapse in the subatomic particles which comprised the silica based gastrointestinal tract of the dining alien, leading to a resonance cascade of rogue neutrinos throughout the dermal layer which instigated a chain reaction in the flagellum matrix. This subsequently rended a five meter hole in the fabric of space-time. Estragondrus and Vladimiroid, along with a nearby bluckbluck named Pozzpozz and his slave pigaloid, Luckinominikus’tipleetay, were consumed by the temporal vortex before it closed three minutes later.

The four flew through a spiraling wormhole of undulating colors and special effects that an LSD enthusiast could only dream of. In the distance they spotted a bright light, constituting the other end of the vortex. Just before they reached it, however, the portal dissolved and they found themselves standing in a plain looking office, occupied by three harried old men sitting behind a long desk. Outside the otherwise mundane windows of the room, they could see the void of outer space. The old men informed the bizarre posse that they were Universal Auditors, and their job was prevent space-time paradoxes and catastrophes. If the group arrived in the past unhindered, which is where the vortex was taking them, they would most likely upset the delicate balance of the space time continuum by purposefully or inadvertently changing something, causing the universe to collapse in on itself and be obliterated due to the ensuing paradox.

The Auditors, knowing that it was only within their powers to restrain the hapless time travelers in their office for a matter of minutes, quickly formulated the best solution they could. To prevent a catastrophic paradox, our heroes would have their memories wiped and replaced for the time being, and be dropped in an abandoned rural area of America in their temporal destination, somewhere about the year 1935. Due to the low level of traffic that traveled through the designated region, and the lack of important landmarks and resources in the area, the Auditors were 98.22% sure they could withhold them without an accidental triggering of a space-time paradox until they figured a way to rectify the situation.

The final precautions that the Auditors had to take were to change their names and identities, transmogrify the two aliens into human form (easier than it looks), and temporarily remove memories and certain areas of higher brain function so that the time travelers would not stray from their temporal “quarantine zone.” This is how Estragondrus-19 became Estragon, or Gogo, how Vladimiroid became Vladimir, or Didi, how Pozzpozz became Pozzo, and how his slave pigaloid Luckinominikus’tipleetay became Lucky. This is also how they wound up as a bunch of confused, seemingly lobotomized bums who consistently return to the same spot every day and can’t remember where they were twenty four hours ago.

After being stuck in the quarantine zone for many years now, somewhere in the minds of the two humans, a faint memory of the Auditor’s promise seems to linger. Before modifying their minds, the Auditors promised that some day they would figure out a way to replicate a reverse time portal and send them all back to the future. At this point the travelers would also be reequipped with their memories and higher brain functions. Until that day, they’d just have to wait. As the Auditors then proceeded to erase their memories, one of the old men sneezed, making a noise sounding something like, “Gah, Gah, GADOUGGGH!” And this is why they insist that they are waiting for a man named Godot.