jetpack_monkey | On monkeys, jetpacks, and humorous juxtapositions

Yesterday, while sitting in the Adventureland section of Disneyland,

faithfully_luna asked me about Monkeys with Jetpacks. She wanted to know how they got the jetpacks. She would not be brushed off with "Because" or "Because it's awesome" or "Because it's really awesome" or "It's just this ever-escalating joke that

airawyn and I had."

She wanted Answers.

Luckily for her, as part of a currently-abandoned NaNo novel that I began in 2004, I wrote quite a bit on Monkeys with Jetpacks. Their habits. Their origins. Their love of destruction. I present all related passages from the novel below. I THINK there's more around somewhere, scrawled in a notebook, but I have no idea where.

The following was hastily written four years ago. Word count was prized over coherence. You have been warned.

***

Elsewhere, deep in space, a spaceship cascaded through the void, propelled only by its own momentum. If it wasn't a complete derelict, it would be after the pirate space monkeys with jetpacks that were currently crawling along its hull were done.

The monkeys (all of the them small, fuzzy, and able to rip the intestines out of a grown man man in armor plating in under 3.5 seconds) were using their nanotech enhanced claws to rip bits of metal out and toss them aside. Some terribly clever captain, after having noticed that his ship was dying, had the forethought to seal the external hatches, ports, everything.

There wasn't even a ridiculously placed heating duct with an even more ridiculous corridor leading right to it. Not a sausage.

The monkeys, for their part, didn't care much. They skittered and stammered and every once and a while took a break from their labors to remove fecal matter from a rectal depository and fling it at their co-workers as a sign of endearment.

Pirate space cyborg monkeys with jetpacks are, by nature, feisty and affectionate. And we would like to take a moment here to reiterate deadly. They'll defenestrate you without so much as a glance. Then, they'll pick your broken and barely breathing body up from the ground, drag you to the nearest tall building and in front of the elevator, climb on top of one another in a casually acrobatic feat to better push the button, wait patiently and chitter about the weather until the car arrives, drag you inside, build an even more complicated pyramid structure to hit the highest numbered button, sit uncomfortably in silence as they watch the digital readout climb until their chosen floor dings, drag you out of the elevator, locate a window that resides 10,000 feet above a piece of spiky corporate art, draw out a diagram of the descent (accounting for wind direction and pesky horizontal flagpoles), take a moment to vote on the best plan of action, and then defenestrate you again.

And then they'll smear feces on your poor impaled corpse. Because you were such a good, if whimpering, sport about things.

While the space monkeys were generally very good about being cruel, they lacked direction in life. After a highly publicized spree of mayhem, they had hit a bit of a rut. The only thing scarier than sadistic pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks were sadistic pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks and ennui. They all got Livejournals. It was bad.

Mr. Morris, a genetically enhanced lemur (also wearing a jetpack), was middle management. Mr. Morris (who, despite being a lemur, was about as tall as a standard human and had a penchant for flared jackets) found them. Mr. Morris gave them purpose. He also gave them a hiring seminar which he rushed through, claiming the entire deal was on the up and up, but he simply didn't have time to answer questions as he was trying to squeeze what was usually a two-hour presentation into 45 minutes.

As the quickly scrawled marker board diagram pointed out, destruction in the name of chaos was self-defeating. Without any real personal platform other than being against everything else, they would simply be tearing down the structures of order around them. Once all of those were gone, there could be no more chaos, since chaos exists only in opposition to order, like joy cannot exist without suffering, and good fashion sense cannot exist without Nehru jackets to rail against.

Of course, Mr. Morris's complicated explanation was simplifed by the marker board representation, "Unfocused chaos = unhappy monkeys."

Mr. Morris went on to explain how even the most destitute pirate cyborg space monkey with a jetpack could self-actualize and use their destructive tendencies in the name of evil. They'd be doing the same basic work they'd always been doing, but now they could earn a paycheck that allowed them to buy the tools to really decimate somebody's perfectly ordered existence (as horrible, merciless death tended to do).

All they had to do was allow a little order in their lives. Specifically, his. Or more specifically, the order of upper evil management, as filtered through Mr. Morris. The promise was solid, as explained by the company motto, which Mr. Morris made sure to write in huge letters on top of the marker board and underline twice - "Commitment to Evil is Our Commitment to You."

Plus, advancement was a big deal. After a trial period of peon-level evil, they could advance up and take charge of small group evil, and perhaps even have Mr. Morris's job and be giving this same lecture someday. All they needed to do was really give there all to the program. He'd talked to other groups of renegade technology enhanced intergalactic animals with self-propulsion devices before, and not all of them made the program. Mr. Morris needed to see that these monkeys weren't just content with entry level evil. He wanted evil that could go career.

After a little deliberation, a few heated arguments, and a few disemboweled pedestrians, the pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks signed on the dotted line. And immediately had chips inserted in their brains that made them unquestioningly loyal to evil with very little free will of their own.

Mr. Morris checked his vacuum-protected checklist and frowned. He clicked his comm button. "Mr. Ook?"

"Eee aah aah?"

"About the 'destruction of hull' line item..."

"Oooh?"

"We're an hour behind. Do you have any idea why?"

"Oooh ah Ek EEE EEE EEE..."

"I don't want excuses, Mr. Ook. Excuses are for losers and we're not losers here. If Mr. Ek and his chattering are slowing down the process, then pull those little nano-enhanced claws of yours out of hull ripping and kill the little shit."

"Eeee ooh ooh..."

Mr. Morris sighed. "Mr. Ook, if I have to come over there and deal with the situation, then we will have two dead pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks on our hands, and that may incur further delays. Then, and I can't stress this next point enough, I'm gonna have to go back to Lord Dorsanyo and explain why you were so behind. It's going to be my ass on the line. And hey, I'll take a laser blast for the team, because I believe in you guys. This doesn't mean I will not vaporize you in a heartbeat, though. Take care of it."

"Ooh ee." The comm shut off.

In the distance, a dead pirate cyborg space monkey floated off the hull, his jetpack forever silenced.

Mr. Morris looked back at his checklist. If they were very lucky, they would be able to skip the "Slaughter Survivors" step and move straight on to "Locate Starmap." Would probably save them the lost hour.

***

Mr. Morris was satisfied to find that prone bodies strewn about the walkways and control stations. Once the external exhaust ports had been sealed, the crew must have succumbed to extreme, unbearable, terribly nasty overheating. Either the captain was exceedingly dim or he valued the ship's cargo over the lives of the crew. In any case, it was one action item that was no longer necessary (see "Kill Crew." Subaction: "Mercilessly").

It also increased the chances that what he was looking somewhere could be found at the end of the Byzantine corridors. This was a Velice design, made to be incredibly confusing to any species not possessed of an innate and overpowering sense of direction.

Mr. Morris did not have an innate and overpowering sense of direction. He could barely be bothered to find the dog food tat the loclal galcit-mart. But there he stood, expected to find his way through.

Of course, he himself would not have to. What Mr. Morris lacked in ability to find his way through shit, he made up for more than completely in a basic surplus of pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks. No, they had no better sense of direction than he - indeed, they were so easily distractable that they could not find each other in a three by three room somedays. But they did have a natural curiousity and exploratory nature. I mean, how could you rip shit to shreds if you didn't go looking for it in the first place?

The pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks were zipping along the corridors, crashing into one another and once again hurling fecal matter after another major sector fo the ship had been completely explored and cleared. There were three teams - initial sets out to disable or empty out the bullet cartridges of the security sytems, the actual explorers, and the demolition team.

All pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks wanted to be on the demolition team. It was antithetical to their nature to really be anything else, and if it weren't for the bloody chips in their brains they might actually be what they were meant to be. If they were at all aware of 20th Century television, specifically the works of Joss Whedon, they might find a sympathetic messiah. But alas, they were not.

Not that pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks did not love television. After a long hard day of mayhem, they like to scamper back to their play- rarium and watch the tube, mainly sitcoms involving a deeply stupid sex crazed person who got into hijinks and occasionally blew shit up.

They had rather hoped that he would a real person. They'd gone down to the studio to try to get him to give them purpose (this was well well well before the appearance of Mr. Morris in their lives). However, Dex Rodner, goofball actor extraordinaire, had proved to be a disappointment in the life imitates art category. In the screaming like a little girl while running for his besotted life category, though, he was aces. Top of the Pops.

Mr. Ookie was scampering down the corridor right now. He was a member of the first team, disabling security systems. Despite being subliterate, pirate cyborg space monkeys had somehow managed to jump the whole communicative language thing and moved right onto computer systems. It was a curious little evolutionary move, but oen fairly well understood if one knew anything about pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks. One can only derive so much fun from pulling the innards out of a single computer.

However, if one knew how to hack massive security systems from a remote machine typically utilized as a spell check and occasional notemaker, the fun was all the more. Explosions would pop up in the most random of places, and when the tech squad finally traced the source of the systems hacking, all they would find is a Little Miss Pocket Organizer and Note Passer.

Invariably, since Security Forces were both reactionary and deeply stupid, the entire female population of the local school district would be arrested and brutally interrogated. There are entire girl gangs out there comprised of girls from schools wehre a Little Miss Pocket Organizer and Note Passer had been connected to a pirate cyborg space monkey's reign of terror.

Suffice to say, there was little that Security Forces did right, except for be both deeply feared and indignantly mocked. Stupidity was a neat little tool that worked in two directions with the public. Security Forces didn't give a shit unless they were under some sort of suspicion for abuse of powers...

Anyway. Back to Mr. Ookie and his scampering spree (and he was a very good scamperer - graceful and lithe and had once been voted Best Scamper by Pirate Cyborg Space Monkeys with Jetpacks Quarterly in its inaugural issue - also its final issue, as the pirate cyborg space monkeys with jetpacks really didn't have the patience to continue). He was working on dodging the bullets of a gatling gun and thinking as much as his chaos addled brain would allow him to that it was rather odd that a ship protecting a secret of any kind should have plain lead bullets to protect it, since those had gone out of style some thousand years ago. And then some.

However, it was not Mr. Ooki's job to question why, it was his to do and to cause others to die. It was a whole pirate cyborg space monkey with a jetpack thing. You would not understand.

Anyway, Mr. Oookie jumped out of the way of one last bullet and watched the magazine of the gun spin, trying to find bullets that simply were no longer there. He chattered happily and then skidded down the hallway, crashing into a massive vault door that was marked in gigantic, somewhat nefarious letters - "CARGO HOLD - VERY SECURE AND HUSH HUSH, SO IF YOU'RE A PIRATE CYBORG SPACE MONKEY BEARING A JETPACK OR OTHER PERSONAL PROPULSION DEVICE, YOU HAD BEST BUGGER OFF NOW, BECAUSE YOU SIMPLY ARE NOT GETTING IN, DIG?"

Mr. Ookie could not read. Luckily, just under that rather ridiculously long warning sign, there was a small red button with the head of a pirate cyborg space monkey (presumably with a jetpack strapped to his back - not shown). Mr. Ookie pressed the button and the message written on the door in gigantic and somewhat nefarious letters repeated in Monkeyspeak - "OOOH EEEE aaah aaah OOOh Eee aal DDD DDd jetpack EEE Ekkie ekkie ftang ftang OOH OOO AAA eee aaa EEEEE ooo UUUU IIIIE IIIIIE iiie EEE Aaah NI!"

Mr. Ookie's eyes popped open. He chittered out the monkey equivalent of "Oh, fuck all, that's some cold shit" (which, incidentally, is just a high pierced yowling sound that lasts some 15 seconds) and scampered back down the corridor to meet up with the exploratory teams, who really should have been the one's to find the vault, as Mr. Ookie should be very dead in his attempts to save them from the security systems, but Mr. Ookie had learned that not dying meant he could cause much more chaos. And causing more chaos made him a very happy pirate cyborg space monkey indeed.

***

If you're not disturbed now, you should be.