The Outer Limits
Our tale begins in May 1999, when I perfected a biological weapon that would kill only Asians.
Now, I know that sounds bad. But it wasn’t. Listen, I only have 900 words here, and there simply isn’t space to properly explain myself. So let’s just take it as an inoffensive starting premise that the Asians had to die. Okay? Good.
Everything was in place. My spores were ready to be propelled high into the atmosphere. Within days they would permeate the globe and infect every human of Mongoloid descent. By the end of the week, this great race would be no more.
My girlfriend at the time was from Taiwan, so I felt I should take her out for a nice dinner before I annihilated her and all her kind. I took her to a local Dim Sum place that was run by a family of immigrants from Guangdong province. They knew about my project, and they treated us like royalty. The food was wonderful, and my girlfriend and I lingered long into the night, drinking rice wine and talking animatedly about her imminent demise. After dinner, a bill was not presented. We returned to my apartment and made love.
It was when she went into her purse to procure the eighth condom of the evening that a pivotal event in world history occurred. A strange object fell out onto the bed. It was a small plastic cup—about the size of a large acorn—with a thin plastic seal across the top. It was filled with a strange, translucent substance.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A mini-jelly cup,” she replied. “It’s an Asian thing. Try it.”
I gingerly peeled back the seal, placed the open cup against my lips, and squeezed. My mouth exploded with pleasure. The lump of jelly in my mouth felt oddly like a peeled grape, but coated with God. I moaned, disoriented, as the sweet taste of jellied lychee fruit assailed my senses. Then, as quickly as it entered my mouth, the jelly slipped down my throat and was gone.
“Holy Christ,” I gasped, tears in my eyes. “That was incredible.”
My girlfriend giggled. “They’re great, aren’t they?”
“Oh, yes,” I sighed.
She gestured to the large, red button on the bedside table.
“The time has come,” she said, tenderly but firmly. “You must release the spores.”
I placed my hand on the button. But right then, as the traces of lychee still lingered on my tongue, the jelly churning in my stomach did something that could never have been predicted. It touched me. It touched me in a place I never knew existed. And suddenly, I had second thoughts.
“I... can’t,” I sobbed.
My girlfriend looked at me with deep sympathy in her eyes, and punched a speed-dial button on my speaker phone. Seconds later I was in a teleconference with the leaders of eleven Asian states.
“Glen!” shouted Keizo Obuchi, prime minister of Japan. “The Asian people of the world are counting on you to press that button! Please don’t let us down!”
“I can’t do it,” I said. “I simply can’t annihilate the entire Mongoloid race! You’ve got to understand!”
“We do understand!” pleaded Kim Dae Jung, South Korean president. “How could we not? It is we who are about to die!”
“You’ve seen our data, Glen,” added Ong Teng Cheong, president of Singapore. “You understand as well as we do that we, and all other Asian people, must be destroyed.”
“Yes, I do, but...”
“But nothing!” shouted Sisavath Keobounphanh, prime minister of Laos, his voice rising in panic. “There is no other option! The very survival of life on Earth depends on the success of your mission! Press the button now, or the fate of humanity will be on your head!”
I stared at the button. Everything they’d said was correct. They had come to me with their science and their predictions. Blinded by the sheer weight of their perfectly straightforward, irrefutable evidence, and swayed by the compelling, simple logic of their conclusions, I had agreed to engineer a race-specific killer spore and annihilate them. Pro bono, no less.
And now, here I was at the moment of truth. Science, logic, and freakin’ common sense demanded that I press that button. But deep in the bottom of the jelly cup I still clasped in my shaking hand, I saw something deeper than the unyielding strictures of logic and the cold empiricism of science. I saw... hope.
“I don’t care what the scientists say!” I shouted. “I can’t send more than two billion people to their deaths!” With that, I smashed the telephone. My girlfriend wept as I flushed the ExterminAsian spores and all 6000 pages of my laboratory notes down the toilet.
It was over. The Southeast Asian leaders bemoaned my action and quietly prepared for the end. But do you know what? On the predicted day later that month, the predicted global catastrophe did not occur. I was right! The Asians did not need to be exterminated, after all.
And so, the Southeast-Asian leaders and I learned a powerful lesson about the ever-present temptation to “play God.” Yes, we had the best science from the world’s best minds, and the best technology the best money could buy—but all we really needed was a little faith. The kind that comes from a little cup.
On November 20 2001, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency banned mini-jelly cup candies from sale in Canada, on the grounds that they are a choking hazard for young children. They will be sorely missed. •
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“The Outer Limits” was the first piece I submitted to The Peak after the ‘Offensively racist’ debacle. Since I’d already been accused of racism, I felt the least I could do was come up with something that deserved to be controversial. The piece is, of course, not at all racist—but it’s loaded with provocative concepts and themes that will send knee-jerk types into conniptions.
Not surprisingly, the piece never made it into print. The copy editor insisted that readers wouldn’t “get it,” a point underscored when he handed the piece to one of our Asian editors, who promptly didn’t get it. Her response: “I don’t see why my people should be at the mercy of your spores.” Oh well.
But, as ever, there’s no accounting for taste. The week after they censored “The Outer Limits,” the same pair of editors let another columnist get away with this:
Celine Dion, we hope your baby gets AIDS. And when they find a cure for AIDS, we hope he dies of anthrax.
Apparently, my crime wasn’t being too offensive—it was being not offensive enough.
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E-mail received from a young Asian-American woman after the piece’s publication on the Internet:
From: MG
Subject: Thanks for the laughs.
Dear Glen:
I just got home from our local Chinatown, where a friend and I were on a quest to find Jelly cups (mango and lychee). After 5 stores, we hit pay dirt, and pretty much cleared them out (they seemed amused, but a tad scared by our exuberance). I became addicted to Jelly Cups on a trip to Taiwan and am very much distressed by the Food and Drug Administration’s recall (did some research online to understand the reasoning behind this madness, and came across your article). My new supply should last a few months (I will strictly ration my consumption, of course), but then what???
Anyhow, thanks for your humorous piece. We concur whole heartedly.
For more letters and editorials in response to the censorship of “The Outer Limits”, follow these links to the Peak web site:
“A modest proposal” (column)
“Right ’Jab falls short” (letter)
“You guys...” (letter)
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