Nucleosaur of the Frigid Lace

by Adam Mac

A long way away—1.185185 quadrillion light years, give or take a billion or two—on an asteroid belt nicknamed the Frigid Lace, the world was populated by nucleosaurs and electrosaurs. [NB: Protosaurs are a strictly human construct as proved by Poodlesky. Ed.]

One such nucleosaur was Stanley Nucleosaurus, Esq. As a nucleosaur, Stanley had a following, so to speak–in his orbit, so to speak again. They were called electrosaurs, or electrosaurus cum minimus negativus, and basically they were servants, but for Stanley they were primarily snacks.

Stanley constantly snacked on his electrosaurs. This had the predictable consequence of Stanley often turning himself into something else. After a couple of electrosaurs, he’d take on the properties of, say, “Strontium saurus” or “Plutonium saurus” or something more exotic. A dozen once transformed him into a flatugenic facsimile of himself and a double double turned him inside out into Defecatorium saurus.

You’d think this would all come to a quick end what with Stanley’s infinite appetite and his finite number of electrosaurs, but it didn’t. So far, we’ve only mentioned his internal consumption, but for every electrosaur he gobbled he consumed two nucleosaurs. This raised Stanley’s electrosaur count to dangerously high levels and challenged scientists to scramble for names, like “Ican’tbelieveIatethewholethingium” or “YikesIthinkIgotabadoneonium.”

All this took its toll on the Frigid Lace. Stanley munched his way from one end of the asteroid belt to the other, devouring everything in sight and leaving behind great clumps of antimatter and clouds of noxious quasar gas. So much had Stanley grown—Giganticus Infinitus Pacmanicus—that astronomers could track his movements as he galumphed acrossed the asteriods as if they were stones in a stream.

Eventually, as the external supply of consumables was depleted, Stanley had to turn exclusively to consuming his own electrosaurs. Long predicted by dark-cloud scientists, Stanley then achieved the first documented interstellar case of absolute subjective annihilation. Id est, he ate himself up.

Adam Mac is a featured author in the Garden of Eden Anthology.