The Situation Demands A Little More Lead...

Uncle Charles had the cruel unknown fate of belonging to a family of accidental serial killers. I say accidental, but it was his own ideas that directly led to the deaths of hundreds of people who put their trust and faith in him; accidents of course. Uncle Charles essentially became an entrepreneur in an age where science seemed a stagnant swamp of ideology. Uncle Charles planned to rejuvenate rationed research and break the mould with something extraordinary. He set about reading every book, article and newspaper he could get his hands on.

Sadly for Uncle Charles, the greatest mobilising influence upon his later research was an article dedicated to the subject of homeopathy and its efficacy as a method of physiological treatment. Uncle Charles became obsessed. He’d become a prominent scholar on particle collision in those intervening years. Now, he cast aside his limiting energies in that area and focused fully on adapting an old project; a homeopathic method to allow man to fly.

Uncle Charles, like all of us, had been raised on a diet of psychosexual parental abuse and American cartoons. As he sat cradling a skinless forearm one day, he mused at the ludicrousness of the coyote and how he took so much time to realise the ground beneath him was nothing but fresh air. Uncle Charles constantly found himself referring back to that moment and it proved to be the guiding light in his later research.

Uncle Charles knew even at that early stage, as he diluted the Parazone fluid to prevent it working its way into his retina, that his project required rationalisation. He decided early on that addressing mode of flight was not the answer. He’d thrust his Russian hamster Veronica from a height of two meters caked in bubble wrap to the ground and achieved only a chorus of popping, cracking and squelching. As he frantically unwrapped the limp beast from the snap and crackle of its final vessel, he decided rapidly to abandon the project. Any hopes he had of an ‘all the king’s men’ rebuilding of the deceased were dashed when a colony of ants took up lodgings in a cerebral cavity and the dog partially defecated on its colon; the nightmares had been terrible.

Perhaps it was maturity and years of cathartic incidents of canine related abuse that finally directed Uncle Charles back to the project as a rationalised physicist. As mentioned, he became convinced that homeopathy was the way to go in achieving flight in man. He noted the existence of three immediate problems: the need for suitable protective clothing, the ability to harness gravity in the form of a homeopathic remedy and the early instigation of a plea bargain for criminal insanity. If Monopoly had taught him anything, it was the value of a Get Out Of (a maximum security) Jail Free Card. Once these issues were resolved, it was all go for the project.

Uncle Charles reviewed the protective clothing of choice for previous attempts at human flight and rationed that previous equipment had been far too safe. He decided based on some self-constructed law of opposites that the most suitable flying suit should possess the absolute minimum of safety features. You could argue that this was where the demise of the whole project as a rational exercise began. Nonetheless, no-one managed to persuade Uncle Charles that a suit resembling a sabre-toothed prolapsed chameleon was simply bad design and he redoubled his efforts towards harnessing gravity.

Uncle Charles decided that the best homeopathic cure for the inability to fly was located in the essence of heavy things. Initially, he introduced his subjects to heavy metal remedies containing lead and arsenic. However, later he was known to try anything heavy from bricks to lipid extractions from obese bingo players. Uncle Charles also extended his programme to include things ‘that got us down’, believing that such things weighed too heavily upon us. Howls and roars of excruciated laughter would squirm from his lab as his subjects undertook intensive courses of tickle-therapy and were subjected to cruel overdoses of slapstick comedy.

However, it seemed no matter what remedy he applied, his subjects simply could not fly. A last gasp attempt involved indulging a bi-plane trial flight lesson so he could capture the essence of light things like clouds, but the results remained disappointing. His homeopathy was becoming erratic also at this point. His calculated dilutions amounted to nothing more than casual guesswork and his means of succussion amounted to nothing more than screaming at the clouds ‘diffuse you floaty bastards’. Uncle Charles himself began to consider whether his project was ever going to garner results.

Perhaps the biggest indicator he should have noted was the growing count of unaccounted missing persons being tallied in the city. Naturally, in the pursuit of science, Uncle Charles had attempted practical investigation of his methods. In true homeopathic style he had decided to introduce height gradually. However, he deduced that attempts at flight were doomed to failure unless the subject leapt from at least fifty metres…

(At the time of writing Charles Whitman is serving an unspecified time in state hospital care. To his evident chagrin, no American state endorses a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card system nor has any intentions to. The bodies of around two hundred people have been recovered from various gorges around the city where the experiments took place and fourteen homeopaths were brutally murdered in revenge attacks someone ironically involving the reckless administration of arsenic oxide).