Do you smell what I smell?
Last night around 10, I smelled maple syrup. Had I knocked a bottle over in the fridge? No. Maybe my neighbor was cooking with it. I didn't investigate further, but when I went to bed at midnight, the smell was still there.
This morning, I logged onto Echo, the online community I'm a member of, and the first post I saw was my friend Jonathan's: "So, what was with the smell of maple syrup in the air yesterday?" Jonathan lives downtown; I live up.
Immediately, other people chimed in, "I smelled it in Brooklyn Heights," "I thought it was just in Chelsea." No one knew what it was, but no one thought it was actually just maple syrup intended to make us have sweet dreams last night. Even the New York Times this morning is baffled.
I have a theory, having recently seen Joss Whedon's "Serenity". The world of Serenity is divided into three groups: the Alliance, who rule everything, claim to be benevolent, but are secretly sinister; the Rebellion, quashed years ago in the war by the Alliance, but still extant in little pockets; and the Reavers, a mutant army of cannibals who live at the edges of space, terrorizing unprotected settlements. (Yes, I am a geek.)
If you haven't seen "Serenity" and would like to, stop reading now, because I'm going to spoil the ending. The band of rebels who are the heroes of the movie discover something in the end: a forgotten civilization whose inhabitants were the unwitting test subjects of the Alliance's experimental calming drug, Pax, distributed through the air. It worked so well that not only did people stop fighting with each other, they gave up living all together. They just lay down one day, and died.
Except for a small percentage of the population, on whom Pax had the opposite effect. It made them super-aggressive. You see where we're going here, right? The Alliance inadvertantly created the rapacious Reavers.
So, our own maplely-good Pax last night. Which of us are going to roll over, which going to start eating our friends? Anyone with connections at the Health Department?
This morning, I logged onto Echo, the online community I'm a member of, and the first post I saw was my friend Jonathan's: "So, what was with the smell of maple syrup in the air yesterday?" Jonathan lives downtown; I live up.
Immediately, other people chimed in, "I smelled it in Brooklyn Heights," "I thought it was just in Chelsea." No one knew what it was, but no one thought it was actually just maple syrup intended to make us have sweet dreams last night. Even the New York Times this morning is baffled.
I have a theory, having recently seen Joss Whedon's "Serenity". The world of Serenity is divided into three groups: the Alliance, who rule everything, claim to be benevolent, but are secretly sinister; the Rebellion, quashed years ago in the war by the Alliance, but still extant in little pockets; and the Reavers, a mutant army of cannibals who live at the edges of space, terrorizing unprotected settlements. (Yes, I am a geek.)
If you haven't seen "Serenity" and would like to, stop reading now, because I'm going to spoil the ending. The band of rebels who are the heroes of the movie discover something in the end: a forgotten civilization whose inhabitants were the unwitting test subjects of the Alliance's experimental calming drug, Pax, distributed through the air. It worked so well that not only did people stop fighting with each other, they gave up living all together. They just lay down one day, and died.
Except for a small percentage of the population, on whom Pax had the opposite effect. It made them super-aggressive. You see where we're going here, right? The Alliance inadvertantly created the rapacious Reavers.
So, our own maplely-good Pax last night. Which of us are going to roll over, which going to start eating our friends? Anyone with connections at the Health Department?
posted by Excellent Walker at 1:10 PM
1 Comments:
I am averting my eyes. I have yet to see Serenity but am longing to. Grrr. Argh.
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