Musings of a Bookkeeper

This is a freewrite I thought you all would enjoy. The point is to sit down and write from beginning to end with no grammar checks, etc, so what you're really after here is content. I got the idea while ushering; the music department has their share of Thors, and I am on to them, oh yes.

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I love old books, which is good, since my livelihood depends on convincing other people they are worthwhile. Luckily, I have a winning smile. When business is slow at the shops, I like to grab old scientific texts and flip through them. It’s terrifying what we thought would be alright, and often funny what we assumed would be okay. Genetic engineering is my current favorite topic. People in the early 90s and 00s were panicking every time some scientist inserted a gene into a fruit to make it resistant to local viruses. Talk about small thinking. Does anyone remember the Golden Rice debacle? That crop could have saved thousands of lives. Or, at least I think so. We’ll never know, because some activist group bombed the greenhouse where the protoplants were being stored, and the engineer who crafted the strain offed himself with equal parts Ambien and Vodka a week later. Poor guy; all those patent laws had worn him down, and he must have not wanted to start over.

Still, it’s kind of amusing. Genetically engineered plants were used in the last war. No one thought their troops would need a solid background in botany not to be lulled to sleep, devoured by acid, or in the case of one platoon, eaten alive by hybrid vines. I think the war ended out of horror more than anything else. That, and America was been torn apart from within by an army of genetically modified men calling themselves Thor. (I have just ensured that anyone reading my diary in the generations to come is going to be convinced I am insane. Hopefully, for the sake of my image, there is something left behind to excavate once they’re done over there.)

I think the general consensus is it started out as a frat joke at some big college in the Northeast. Some sort of ostensibly pagan activist group which believed the answer to the war was to sort of...clean house within the US Government. Even when their numbers grew, no one took them seriously until the President was assassinated by a thrown hammer at 800 feet. Turned his skull into pudding. They weren’t actually stronger; they’d just been modified to produce adrenaline constantly, which made them feel like they could do these things.

I think one of the reasons no one paid attention until it was too late is because no one could take these guys seriously. They’d grow their hair out, and if it weren’t wavy, they’d actually wave it. The only requisite to becoming a Thor was being blonde of one shade or another, but they tended to work out a lot on account of not wanting to look bad in the loincloths, so eventually they all ended up looking alike. People used to sit and wonder how, if they all called each other “Thor,” was it possible for them to ever pick their friends out at the Thorventions? (I still wonder about this.) Their silly image was, in the end, their ultimate weapon.

Thousands of people a year are still dying at the hands of the Thors, and I do feel bad sitting here being so cheeky about it, safe in my little country across the sea. But we are less complacent; we have learned from America’s mistakes, and will not be taken by surprise.

After all, London may have its odd members of society, but a hulking blonde man in a loincloth is going to stand out. (At least I should hope so; otherwise I have made myself look quite silly again in the eyes of my descendants.)