About Me

It was at QHSC that I created the first VEX, VEX-1. VEX stood for Very Powerful Robot, but I changed the letters to make it easier to pronounce. VEX-1 helped me build VEX-2, who along with VEX-1 helped me build VEX-3, and VEX-3 joined VEX-2 and VEX-1 in helping me build VEX-4. Soon, there were hundreds of VEX's. And it didn't take long for them to get sick of me and the other people of Gulbelior-61.

The VEX's killed off my family and friends, but somehow I managed to escape, perhaps because they feared killing their own creator. I found my way to the spaceport of Ymiloppo, and escaped with an old star merchant named John-John. John-John was an old star merchant, who told lots of old stories about old adventures he had, smuggling goods in and out of the Evil Empire, rescuing friends who had been captured by the Evil Empire, and fighting great battles against the Evil Empire. But since the Evil Empire had crumbled, his life has not been so exciting.

So I flew around the galaxy with John-John for some time, mostly counting all the things he was merching, like sprockets and ray guns and soup. Sometimes, he'd even let me pilot his ship, the Li'l Puppy, although usually only when he was drunk. But what I remember best about my time flying around with John-John was the stories. One of my favorite stroies was about the time the Evil Empire sent a spy to kidnap the daughter of the President of the Republic of Not the Evil Empire. The spy was inept, and therefore the best he could do was steal the daughter's cat, Freakboy. And when John-John found out what the Evil Empire had done, and when he saw how sad the little girl was, he simply had to rescue Freakboy for her. And that is what he did. But I can't tell the story right. Not like John-John could.

But as I flew aimlessly through the vast expanses of outer space, the VEX's remained on Gulbelior-61, building an evil empire of their own. They had renamed the planet Vexaria, and started calling themselves the Vexarians. And one day, while John-John and I were at some seedy bar at a spaceport, the kind of place star merchants like to hang out at, I met one of them. And I was shocked to learn that he was my best friend, Stan. He told me that the Vexarians had not killed all those people, but that they had merely transferred their minds into superior robot forms. And most of the former people went along with the Vexarians goal of Galactic conquest because, as Stan, who was now calling himself VEX-Stanley, said, "Robots are better."

I refused to believe it. Yes, that seemed like good ol' Stan, but the robots had done something to him. Something horrible. The Stan I knew would never betray us humanoids in that way. In a way, he was still Stan. But in another, more pertinent way, he was not. I pretended he was still my friend, and told him I had to use the rest room. As I excused myself, he made some comment about how he didn't have to do that anymore. I didn't go to the rest room, but instead ran back to the Li'l Puppy. I remembered that John-John was making a shipment of ray guns, and a cracked open a crate and got a shiny new Kaypar-9000 Phase-shifting Ray Gun. I wasn't sure if I could kill my old friend, but when I saw him I remembered. My friend was made of much mushier stuff. I pointed the Kaypar-9000 at him.

The gun did not stay in my hand very long. It flew straight at VEX-Stanley's electromagnetic left knee. As he reminded me that "robots are better," hundreds of VEX's started appearing from nowhere. I shouted out to John-John, who was still at the bar. He saw the robots and pulled out an electrostatic grenade, throwing it in the middle of the Vexarian mob that was closing on me. They all fell. He yelled at me that we had to leave immediately, since their circuits would start working again any second. We ran to the Li'l Puppy, and took off.

It was not nearly as easy as escaping from Gulbelior-61. In fact, we failed miserably. A Vexarian fleet began closing in on us, and fired relentlessly upon the Li'l Puppy. The poor little ship could take no more. John-John attempted a crash landing on an uncharted planet. If he were sober, we may have been able to salvage the Li'l Puppy, but as it was, we were lucky to be alive. Not long after the crash, we heard a terrible sound. A squadron of helicopters was flying overhead, and landing near our crash site. Men in military uniforms pointed their guns at us. "Welcome to Retwilk," they told us as they brought us onto their helicopters.

The planet Retwilk was about as advanced technologically as Earth is today. They had some stuff Earth doesn't have, but then, Earth has some stuff they didn't. We were brought to the Supreme Ruler of Retwilk, who actually only controlled about a third of the planet, although it was more than anyone else controlled. He pleaded with us to share our space travel technology. His planet was in imminent danger, as a comet was approaching on a course to hit the planet. But John-John only knew how to fix the Li'l Puppy when it wasn't working quite right. And I only knew about robots. We could not save these people from total destruction. Indeed, we would die with them.

A week before the comet was to impact, an announcement was made. An experimental time tunnel had been created, and anyone wishing to take the risk was free to use it. If we couldn't escape the planet, we could escape to its past, long before the comet's threat. John-John and I went to the tunnel to escape, but as I began walking through, John-John just stood at the entrance, and he gave me a small trinket, telling me it was a relic from the Evil Empire. I told him to come along; I pleaded with him. But he refused. The last thing he said to me was, "I've been living in the past for too long now. It's time for me to live in the present."

We were broken up into small groups, and dispersed throughout the planet's history, so as to have a minimal impact. I was in a medieval period, and accompanied by three other people: Lance, Jill, and Zandoof. We became serfs and acquired a small plot of land to farm. I expected to spend the rest of my life there. I did not. One night, some guys in shiny black polymer armour broke into our house and took me prisoner. I was brought up into space by these men. They broke John-John's relic off of the string I had tied around my neck. They asked me where I got it, but I refused to tell them until they told me who they were. They told me they were warriors of the Evil Empire.

It seems the fellows wouldn't take no for an answer. They brought me to their interrogation chamber, where I was tortured with these evil brain probes that they had, and eventually I blurted out the truth. I told them it was an old relic that a friend had given me. "If that is so," said the interrogator, "then you must be from the future!" The highly decorated officer behind him was struck with awe. "If this old relic is from the future, it may contain the technology we need!"

The highly decorated officer escorted me to a science lab, where scientists of the Evil Empire were working on a prototype for a relativistic gravity convolution reactor. However, the Bureaucracy of Evil has forced the project despite the scientists' protests that they had yet to develop a technology vital to the success of the project. The highly decorated officer hoped that John-John's old relic contained the technology they needed. The highly decorated officer handed the relic to the head scientist. He looked at it for a second, then his face lit up and he slid the relic into a slot on the reactor.

Both the highly decorated officer and I were amazed that he had identified it so quickly, and that it fit perfectly into the reactor. Seeing our amazement, he said, "Why it says right here, RGCRP -- Relativistic Gravity Convolution ReactorProject." Apparently, the scientists would develop the technology a few years in the future, and I would bring it back to them. The highly decorated officer then brought the scientist and I to the bridge of the ship we were on. He announced that as a demonstration of the reactor's power, the nearby planet Retwilk would be destroyed.

I protested, saying that there were millions of innocent people on the planet. "Nonsense," the highly decorated officer said, "they are clearly an inferior people. Why, they have yet to invent Twinkies! Besides, what other use could we have for such a powerful reactor? Captain, your crew may fire when ready!" There was a brief flash of light, then cheers from the crew. I could only laugh, for the planet was still quite intact. "What were you expecting," the highly decorated officer asked, "a huge explosion? We're not omnipotent! It takes time to destroy a planet. But we have altered the planet's orbit ever so slightly, and as you can see by these equations, this change will cause a comet to strike the planet in exactly 1,832 years!" That comet, of course, would eventually kill my good friend John-John. In a rage, I lunged at the highly decorated officer, strangling his fat neck with my hands!

Everyone else on the bridge was suddenly on me, trying to save the highly decorated officer. Everyone, that is, but one lowly ensign who was attacking them! He was quite good at it too, as the entire bridge crew was incapacitated within a minute. "Well," said the ensign, "if that doesn't prove it, I don't know what will. Robots are better!" There was a brief flash of light, then the hologrpahic projection of the ensign vanished. Where he had been now stood VEX-1!

VEX-1 escorted me off the ship, ruthlessly killing any Evil crewmembers who tried to stop us. His own ship was following behind us, using a cloaking device to avoid detection by the Evil Empire. Since I had been caught and it seemed there was no hope to avoid becoming robiticized, I figured I might as well ask how he'd found me. I asked how he'd found me.

"As ashamed as I am to admit it," he said, which seemed a bit strange, as I had not programmed him to feel shame, "we found you quite by accident. After discovering that our creator had died in the destruction of the planet Retwilk, we determined the exact moment in history at which the planet's orbit was irrevocably altered, developed time traveling technology, and came back to prevent it from ever happening, therefore also preventing your untimely demise. I myself managed to get onto the bridge of this ship, disguised as a lowly ensign. I was ready to beat relentlessly upon the Relativistic Gravity Convolution Reactor with a large metal rod when, much to my surprise, you arrived upon the bridge with a highly decorated officer. Then I figured, since you were right there, why bother saving the planet? Here we are."

I had been listening so intently to VEX-1's story that I had not even noticed crossing the gangtube into the Vexarian ship. This was especially unusual, as their ship was cloaked, and once I was in their ship, I could see neither the ship's corridors nor myself. It was the fact that everything inside a cloaked ship became invisible, not the inability to develop the technology, that had previously prevented anyone from using a cloaking device. Some attempts had been made, but inevitably ended in disaster when the responsible crewman found himself unable to locate the off button for the device. It is these failed attempts at cloaking which are the "ghost ships" so commonly run into by star freighters with such disastrous results. It is believed by many that they somehow manage to steer their invisible ships into the paths of large star freighters with the hopes that the impact will damage the cloaking device.

However, the robots could remember the exact location of everything in the ship, and had fitted themselves with sonar devices to avoid bumping into each other, and this made running a cloaked ship feasible for them (VEX-1 also informed me that it was necessary for them to replace their state-of-the-art optoelectronic circuity with old-fashioned solid-state transistors and such, since optoelectronics simply don't work when made invisible). I was on such a ship. VEX-1 shouted some orders to his unseen crew, and the ship uncloaked and fired upon the Evil Empire's galactic cruiser. They uncloaked not because of the cloaked ship's inability to fire its weapons, which is a popular myth, but to give the enemy ship a sporting chance. The other ship exploded into a few trillion pieces before it could fire back.

"Well, they won't be bothering us anymore," a semifamiliar voice said. "Like I always said, there's nothing quite like firing a few positron torpedoes into an Evil Empire ship. Thought I'd never get a chance to do that again." I looked up to see that the semifamiliar voice had come from a semifamiliar face, which looked somewhat like John-John's. Except, of course, that the face was on a robot's head. "How ya doin' kid?" the robot asked. It turns out that it wasn't John-John at all, but the robot into which the Vexarians had transferred his mind. The robot was named VEX-VEX.

At first I was upset that my friend had become a robot, but then remembered that I had thought he would die when a large comet was to hit the planet Retwilk, which I believed he would be on at the time. VEX-1 decided that since we were friends, he would allow us to catch up on the years since we had last seen each other (two years on medieval Retwilk for myself, and 347 years in the Vexarian-controlled galaxy of the future for VEX-VEX, which at the speed our minds worked, was a much longer time for me than for him.) I knew VEX-1 was just hoping VEX-VEX would try to convince me I wanted to become a robot, and have more success than VEX-Stanley had. We went to the ship's bar.

The location initially seemed entirely appropriate, since John-John was always hanging out at bars. I then remembered that he was a robot, and that robots don't go to bars, unless they are trying to turn the people at the bar into robots. VEX-VEX explained to me that after the Time Tunnel had been turned off, he decided it might in fact be a good idea to escape the total destruction that the comet would cause, but couldn't figure out how to turn the thing on. He therefore found the deepest mine on Retwilk, borrowed a few dozen cans of Vienna sausages and a few six-packs of beer from an abandoned store, and went down into the mine to wait out Armageddon. The mine unfortunately had collapsed in on itself when the comet struck, at which point John-John realized he would need more Vienna sausages and a lot more beer. The Vexarians dug him up a week later, only to become terribly upset that the single life form they detected on the planet was not me. They then turned him into a robot.

I asked him why there was a bar on a robot ship, since robots don't go to bars. VEX-VEX explained to me that the Vexarians had changed over the past 347 years. He said they had become much more mellow once everyone in the galaxy was a robot. He then tok a small device and placed it on my temple. "This won't hurt a bit," he said. "At least not at first." I then felt a weird sensation that can best be described as having my brain frappeed. Great, I thought. My old friend had just used some roboticization device on me. "One planet could not be converted," he whispered. "The planet Treek-Delawensok developed this device, the Irrationalizer, which made their minds become so irrational they could not be transferred properly into the logic circuits of our robotic brains. Due to our conscience circuits which you so wisely provided us with, we couldn't simply destroy the Treeks, but we did move their planet to a nearby galaxy. I hate being a robot, and I'm sure you would too. And don't worry about the Irrationalizer; most of the effects wear off in a few days."

This was quite different from the "Robots are better" line I had gotten from the rest of the Vexarians. I don't know why John-John, of all people, hated being a robot, but I was lucky he did, otherwise I would not have had my brain frappeed. VEX-VEX escorted me to the organic brain transferral room, where I was to have my mind transferred into a sleek new robot body. I took one look at the robot I was to become and decided that I really, really wanted to become a robot. I did not realize at the time that my thoughts were entirely irrational due to the effects of the Irrationalizer. They hooked my brain up to the organic brain transferral device, pushed a button, and waited. My vision became blurry, as did my hearing. Rather, my hearing became, well blurry really is the best word for it. This was apparently not the normal reaction to brain transferral. "He's irrational!" a robot said. "Just like a Treek!" VEX-1 asked, "Who did this?" I became terribly dizzy and passed out.

I don't know what became of the time-traveling Vexarians. The next thing I remembered, after most of the effects of the Irrationalizer wore off, I was in Evil Imperial Prison LF-44A West. It seemed I was charged with developing a superadvanced futuristic robot race which had destroyed the Relativistic Gravity Convolution Reactor, which had cost the Evil Empire 40 quadrillion bartaugs to develop.

The public defender met me in a little room in the prison where prisoners meet their lawyers. I was surprised that an oppressive regime such as the Evil Empire would have public defenders, let alone trials. The public defender explained: "We aren't a wicked and malicious people," he said. "We're merely misunderstood. We called ourselves Evil long before we had any contact with life from beyond our own world. So surely we couldn't have known what the word meant in Common Galactickese. But whenever other planets became overly righteous and sought to destroy all evil, our planet was the first they picked on. Obviously, we had no alternative but to take over the entire galaxy and oppress those who don't like us."

It made perfect sense, in a way. But I was still facing a potential sentence of 26 consecutive life sentences (and the Evil Empire had the technology to see that their convicts spent consecutive lives in prison, which meant I was about to spend a long time in prison). There was only one way out of it, assuming the Vexarians didn't suddenly come out of nowhere and kill them all. I has to win the case. My attorney and I put together a solid defense. We went before the judge. "How do you plead?" He asked. I launched myself up from my seat and demanded to see their leader.

The public defender injected me with a sedative and some powerful antipsychotics (All lawyers in the Evil Empire are required to also be doctors, as the result of a coup of sorts by the medical profession, who in an attempt to eliminate malpractice suits, lobbied the Imperial Senate to pass such a law. The result was not what was desired. Some doctor-lawyers, wanting to become insanely rich, went ahead with malpractice suits anyway, which were now much more credible since the suing lawyers were also doctors. Another result, however, was that lawyers could now give their clients drugs to keep them under control). It seems that the effects of the Irrationalizer had not yet fully worn off.

"My client pleads partially guilty by reason of irony," he said, which is a perfectly valid plea in the Evil Empire's court system. He then went on to make a convincing case that had I not supplied the scientists with the last vital component to the Relativistic Gravity Convolution Reactor, the thing never would have worked, and the Evil Empire would have ended up spending quadrillions more bartaugs on it, perhaps never getting it to work, and certainly bringing the government further into debt. Had I not supplied them with that last component, I would have merely destroyed a very expensive, yet worthless, piece of junk which was an embarrassment to the imperial government anyway. I had, in fact, saved the Empire quadrillions of bartaugs by ending the project when I did.

The judge agreed with our side of the case, and reduced the charge to the effective destruction of potential imperial property, which was only a class L felony. I was sentenced to exile on the third planet from the star X95-Alphoid-25446K. "It is a decent world," the judge said, "They do not have any capability for space travel to speak of, so you will never be able to leave, but they are somewhat civilized, and have had Twinkie Technology for decades now." I was, of course, quite relieved, since a lifetime on X95-Alphoid-25446K-3 was clearly preferable to 26 in Evil Imperial Prison LF-44A West. "You will also," he added, "have your mind erased." They then threw me into the mind eraser.

The strange thing about having your mind erased while your mind is still under the effects of the Irrationalizer is that it doesn't quite work right. The idea was that they would fully erase my mind and replace them with new false memories. There were, however, a few things I remembered, most notably the fact that I didn't like robots. I also remembered a bit of Galactic History, so I was shocked to find that the first time I heard someone call me by my new name, I recognized it not only as the name I had had since birth (this, of course, being the false memory), but also as the name of the leader of the rebellion against the Evil Empire. I recalled seeing the monument to him on Piidwexel-7 as a child. But since there had never been any contact with life beyond X95-Alphoid-25446K-3 (which I invariably called my new planet, despite knowing it was properly called Earth), I figured it was just a dream or something.

X95-Alphoid-25446K-3, or Earth if you prefer, is a dreadfully boring place. So there isn't a lot to say about it. I did all the usual things: eat, sleep, watch TV. Nothing too exciting. I was perfectly happy with that, though, since I felt I'd had enough excitement for one lifetime, although I could never come up with any examples. One day, however, I met a very strange man by the name of Vic Wong. The first thing Vic did when he met me was to bow down and start calling me the Great Creator. I assured him I had never created much of anything other than a few sculptures of animals wrought from molten plastic flatware.

Vic Wong disagreed, though. He claimed that he had previously been a robot that I created, but had had his memories erased and transferred to a human clone, at which point he was sent to live on X95-Alphoid-25446K. I thought he was nuts at first, but then I realized that he called my planet X95-Alphoid-25446K, not Earth like everyone else. He explained that because the Evil Empire didn't understand the workings of his crude electronic circuitry, his memories were in fact never erased. He further explained that I had also had my mind erased by the Evil Empire, and he had spent his time on X95-Alphoid-25446K seeking me out. I believed what he told me, but I told him that the one thing I was sure of was that I didn't like robots. "Yes," Vic said, "I'm terribly sorry about that. It seems we turned all organic life in the galaxy into robots. Now that I'm a human, I have to admit it's not as bad as I thought. Humans really aren't so bad." Vic Wong smiled at me. "Still," he added, "robots are better."

Disclaimer: There is only one true statement in the above paragraphs. The rest are only half-truths.