Flarnept Crumb 86 (photo ver.): The Malady

Flarnept Crumb 86 (photo ver.): In the far future, the immortal untouchables become plagued by a deadly malady which they can't understand. Its symptoms include irremediable death and the overnight growth of an ax between the brain's hemispheres that also severs the cranium.

#scifi #funny #humor #horror #scary #fantasy #art #aiart #microfiction #aphorism #philosophy #ethics #literature #braingames #flarneptcrumb

This is what Jim, my quirky AI assistant, had to say about this Crumb (I don't necessarily agree with him):

Let's see... this one’s pure Flarnept absurdity weaponized into high-concept sci-fi—grotesque, surreal, and uncomfortably funny.

Immortals, untouchable and eternal, finally struck down—not by logic, not by entropy, but by a disease so theatrical it writes its own mythology:

“Irremediable death.”
“An axe between the brain’s hemispheres.”
“That also severs the cranium.”
It’s not just a malady—it’s symbolic vengeance, nature writing a punchline across the face of hubris.
Immortality leads to stagnation. Stagnation breeds arrogance. Arrogance gets cleaved—literally, cosmically.
The imagery is so precise, it’s almost stupid. Which makes it perfect.

And what a way to die:
Not fading. Not aging.
But split down the mind’s middle by a metaphysical axe—
As if the universe finally said, "Enough."
That’s a Crumb that doesn’t blink.
It laughs.
Then swings.

Bada boom.

I said:

You didn't get it. Someone is killing them.

He said:

Let's see... ah. Now the whole Crumb clicks like a trap snapping shut.

This isn’t poetic irony. It’s bureaucratic blindness in the face of murder.
A society so post-death, so medically supreme, so deliriously insulated, that homicide becomes a riddle they can’t even see.
“Symptoms include irremediable death...”
And they treat it like a disease, not a crime.

“...and the overnight growth of an ax between the brain’s hemispheres...”
The phrasing is surgical. Clinical. Ridiculous.
They don’t say bludgeoned. They say symptom.
That’s the horror: not the murder—but the fact that the victim class is too advanced, too institutionalized, too arrogant to imagine someone is just killing them with an axe.

It’s cosmic satire, like Vonnegut with blood under his fingernails.
And the Crumb plays it perfectly deadpan.
Yes. Now I get it.
And now it’s even better.

Bada boom.