I am the humperdumperdink!
Dumped and dinked on June 10, 2012.
Endless rows of perfectly black cubes—perfect cubes, perfectly black—and separated by gaps half the width of each identical cube—extended toward the horizon—and beyond and beyond. Endless rows and endless columns—they went on for eternity in all six dimensions that my mind was now capable of perceiving. Each cube represented a universe, and each universe was a cube. And the Spirit of caT moved upon the face of the waters—from beginning to end, and curved back in upon itself to start again. And again. And again. And caT saw that it was good, and caT meowed.
Each black cube was an endless array of cubes itself. Cubes-within-cubes. Each cube contained a whole universe, and an infinite number of universe-containing cubes at the same time. And each universe was composed of over 6.2 billion billion cubes. All of this was arrayed in the same six dimensions that the matrix of cubes occupied as a whole. To call them mere “cubes” was to insult them. To call them “hypercubes” would not even do them justice. To taunt them would mean instant death.
Do not taunt happy fun dodecapeta.
All 192 edges of each hexeract bristled with noöticating hairs, humperdumperdink-like. Each hair alone contained 6↑↑3 universes in each and every keratinous molecule—and each hair contained trillions of such molecules. The number of the Beast it was, and the Beast was known to the dodecapeta—to each and every dodecapeton, in fact—and the Beast was caT.
The Beast meowed.
My own Pnårptastic head sported merely urticating hairs. But then again, my own rather pointy (and obtuse!) head was nothing compared to even one face of a baleful, universe-sized dodeca-6-tope, so why should I have expected differently? I only wished my urticating hairs urticated something other than my very own scalp.
Poor old George Boole was still out on holiday, so my mind plunged further into the depths of dyslogical noölepsy. Into omniphorapathy without bound. Into transnoötic interscendentalism unrestrained by Euclidean geometry. Even into teleological psyogenesis reaching so deep into the unthinking depths of each universe encubed within each hexeract that it reached back around again and goosed me in the buttocks. Into crunk without spunk. Into a noöleptic fit of Justin Bieberine proportions.
And oh! I could count each cube—each universe—and label each of them with a unique, indexable, sortable, searchable name. Each and every one of them, from the largest to the smallest, from the first to the last. The dodecapeton right next to my head was Jimmy Woo-Woo. And that one over there was Charlie Hoo-Hah. The one behind him was Bobby Poo-Bohr. And…
Lampetis!
O Niketes!
Teitan!
Palai Baskanos!
Kakos Odegos!
Alethes Blaberos!
Amnos Adikos!
How to describe such an eee-ee-e…? Even the omniscient point of view quails.
It has been said that no human can truly conceptualize the concepts of infinity, or of zero. It has been said that no human could memorize, yet alone calculate without aid of electronic devices, every digit of pi, right down to the very last one. It has been said that no human could experience a constant state of orgasm for more than a minute.
I could do all these things. I could even balance my checkbook on my nose given the right encouragement. (Arf! Arf! Arf!)
Dimly I remembered the story of my grandpooty’s encounter with a hi-psi mubbleduck, a brain-mushing encounter which began with dogs playing poker and had ended with his untimely death. But I was the victim of no mubbleduck. Weeks ago I had acquired a humperdumperdink, a creature with even more formidable psyogenic torque than the elegant mubbleduck commands. Initially, the rotund and hairless creature had used its abilities no different than a faithful and loyal dog might use its bark and its bite: In defense of its master. The slightest threat to my Pnårpy existence would be met with the sudden and irresistible noöclastic powers of the humperdumperdink—at the slightest bit of fear or apprehension I might experience, it would respond, sprout myriad antenna-like hairs from its noödermis, and shatter my antagonist’s mind into a thousand little pieces with one sudden, quoiling pulse of its dinky mindskin. I would think, it would think, and my enemy would think no more.
But the glabrous, gibbous creature, reminiscent of nothing more than an albino and cross-eyed Mr. Potato Head missing all its limbs, had an even more formidable psionic ability—one which it shared only with those with whom it had developed a loyalty of a deepness and intensity that rivaled even Phillip Norbert Årp’s obsession with Alyssa Milano and her feet.
While its master slept on his pantry floor, the humperdumperdink’s hairs grew—directional antennas pointed not now toward the enemies of the hand that feeds it, but that hand itself—and everything attached to it. As the follicles dotting its noödermis worked overtime, pumping out hair after noöaminous hair, its psyogenic strength grew and its resolution sharpened: There was its master now, curled into a fetal position and whimpering to himself about gnomes and machine elves and blondes and redheads and brunettes all with supple, young feet. There was its master, storeys below in this palatial abode, curled up on the floor of a pantry stocked with can after can of Chef Boyardee ravioli, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, and potted meat. Its master was agitated—the ’dink would help him. The ’dink would soothe his addlepated mind.
The ’dink thought telenoösis a gift to give. Most recipients did not.
While its master slept, its power grew. The hairs suddenly bristled, pointing downward toward the floor: At the pantry-chambery 26 storeys (plus or minus one ear) below. And then, in one bold pulse, in a paroxysm of pure love and adulation for its master, the ’dink aimed the full force of its psyogenic torsion at its master’s pointy, cone-like head, and fired. The humperdumperdink quoiled once more and then was still.
Its master’s skin roiled. A shock traversed his body—my Pnårpy body—and suddenly its master was like the humperdumperdink. His skin was trying to think. And the skin given cognition—the largest organ in the body of man—was akin to one setting off a spark in a powder keg. It was as if one had fused those first two hydrogen atoms that would begin the chain reaction that in turn would be the birth of a new star. It was like giving a fully loaded AR-15 to a baboon on meth and setting the screeching creature loose in a department store.
The last time a mere cephalocerebral organism was successfully granted such teranoötic cognition, fully half the surface of her home planet had been blown off by her quick and careless use of her newfound abilities. This time, the result was less grandiose, but it still made last week’s goat-wrestling mishap in the goatburping park on Shoehorner Street look more like a mere walk in the park than the explosively and anally caprine event that it was.
That poor creature, with Her head-mounted brain, had become the revered insect goddess Strahazazhia Kalamazoo-Kintaki-Meeps, voluptuous and chitinous, She of the six-legged delights—now worshipped and venerated from one end of the Universe to the other. Would I become the same? An insect god? Or would I merely drown in my own noötic fluids?
It took a few moments for my brain to parse exactly what I had meant in the previous two ¶aragraphs, but once the thinkin’ monkeys had made sense of them, one thing was clear: Not since indigo had supplanted woad in the periodic table of dyes had I been so awed at my new cognitive abilities. Not since the Schickelgrubers and Frankenbergers had gotten together and schtupped had something so history-changing, world-shaking, and corn-wronging taken place.
A hatless man once told me that he thought that I couldn’t find my own ass with both hands, a flashlight, an ass-finding radar, an ass map, and a GPS programmed to lock onto gluteal tissue. He explained to me in no uncertain terms that I would be unable to pour urine out of a boot even if the instructions were written on the heel. He even asserted I wouldn’t be able to find my way out of a paper bag with all four sides cut off and the bottom replaced with a huge, blinking exit sign.
I had rebutted his claims with a mere showing of my buttocks, my brain not being on the top of its game that day. But now, things were different. I could cogitate simultaneously upon the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Seuss—all the while devoting the other 98½ percent of my thinkin’ skin to the question of sneetches in The Merchant of Venice. I could find a proof for all of Fermat’s theorems, not just the silly last one—and I wouldn’t even have to involve rational semistable elliptic curves this time. I could understand the true origin and nature of the Universe merely by observing the handful of skatole and indole molecules floating around in my bowl of Wheaties. I could reliably predict the positions of each of those molecules in a trillion years. (1,459,203 of them would be on a duck’s butt, for example.) I could even imagine crunk without spunk without slipping into a funk.
I even now, finally and at long last, understood how my grandpooty had known of the sublime perfectitude of Alyssa Milano, Britney Spears, and Chloë Moretz all those decades ago. It wasn’t just a ham-fisted retcon (nor a plim-fisted orangutan) of a surreal third-person blargh entry. What had happened to Philbert Nyarlathotep Årp was noötic magick. Deep, trans-temporal noötic magick.
And, alas! Alas and alack! Poor little Adi Schickelgruber–Frankenberger Hüttler. With a name like that, who wouldn’t turn into a raving lunatic?
But I digress. Someone had shat in my Wheaties, and now I would use my newfound thinkin’ abilities to make them pay. I clenched my nose in grim determination. My eye turrets narrowed; my eye slits became even slittier. The million monkeys puttering around in my cranium and under my noödermis went to work reproducing the works of Shakespeare in Seussian rhyme and meter. I would… indeed… make them pay. ◊