by LAURIE NEIDERGAARDEN, Alternate Reality News Service Medical Writer
Magnus Squitherington XXXIII IIIrd, heir to the Squitheringtonne (he dropped the last two letters when he took out American citizenship) hair tonic and salad dressing fortune, had met the woman of his dreams and was considering marriage when she dropped a bombshell on him: she could never marry a man without a soul.
"Soul?" Squitherington sniffed. "Soul? I thought that she was talking about something you ate amandine with a squirt of lemon. Really, why would eating fish be so important that it could stop us from uniting in the holy real estate of matrimony?"
Irina Velasquez-Pedrodottir, his inamorata, patiently explained that the soul she was seeking did not come from the sea, but from within. It only took her several months to convince Squitherington that, if he really loved her, he would get a soul.
"Mumsy was dead set against it," Squitherington stated. "Said it would interfere with my running the business and all that. But, damme, some things are more important than business, and Irina Velasquez-Pedrodottir is two of them!"
Squitherington and Velasquez-Pedrodottir consulted Doctor Raoul "Shaky" Alzheimer, the foremost South American soul cloning expert. The sale of souls has, of course, been banned by international treaty, leading, inevitably, to soul-jacking and the dead soul market (led by a mysterious Kazakh known only as "Gogol"). Soul cloning, on the other hand, because nobody can see it doing harm to the donor, is a grey area in international law.
This does not mean that it is going to become as common as head transplants any time soon. "We're in the very early stages of soul cloning research," recently underemployed soul authenticator turned cable news pundit Israel "Joe" Peninsula explained, "and the results are highly discouraging. Anybody who had a clone of John Lennon's soul would be lucky to have Ringo Starr's songwriting talents. Oh, yeah. It's that bad."
Squitherington initially purchased a seven day trial clone of the soul of Bono, the lead singer of the musical group U2. (His soul was shaped like a square. Boring, to be sure. You never know with souls.) "He was artistic and had a social conscience," Velasquez-Pedrodottir explained. "And, he was Irish. A soul doesn't get any better than that!"
The only effect the new soul had on Squitherington was a mild nagging at the back of his consciousness when he was surfing the Internet for rubber ducky porn. When it became clear that the Bono soul clone was something of a dud, Velasquez-Pedrodottir insisted he return it for another model.
Poor cloning is not the only problem with soul transplants, as the couple soon found out. It is not unusual for some bodies to reject souls that are placed within them; in fact, some studies have shown that upwards of 60 per cent of recipients have their cloned souls thrust out of their bodies within 24 hours after surgery.
Squitherington had a clone of the soul of Nelson Mandella placed inside of him. (It looked like a blue baby dill pickle with little pink umbrellas coming out of either end.) When he first regained consciousness, such as it was, Squitherington developed an inexplicable interest in rugby. Only five minutes later, though, he was shaking violently, spewing soul matter out of his mouth.
"Oh, ick," Squitherington said of the pink and blue mess on his clinic bedsheets.
"Yuck!" Velasquez-Pedrodottir agreed.
"Most unpleasant," Peninsula put in.
"Let's not jump to conclusions here, shall we?" Dr. Alzheimer responded. "Improvements in matching and transplanting techniques happen all the time, and I wouldn't be surprised if we had the rejection rate down to 57 or even 56 per cent within the next decade!"
"Besides," Dr. Alzheimer added, "soul rejection is no more painful or horrifying than your average exorcism..."
At this point, most people would have given up on their quest for a soul, but not Magnus Squitherington XXXIII IIIrd. "Quitting?" he mused. "A Squitherington in love never quits! That would just be arthritic."
Arthritic?
"That's right."
Do you mean "pathetic?"
"That's what I said."
No, you said, "arthritic."
"That's right."
You said "arthritic" when you meant "pathetic."
"Well, now you're just playing with words, aren't you?"To date, Squitherington has tried to have transplants of the clones of the souls of Woody Allen, Peter Garrett, Peter Gabriel, Peter Pan, Barbara Streisand ("The less said about that, the better," Velasquez-Pedrodottir allowed), Pope Benedict XVI (with his reluctant blessing) and Anderson Cooper. All to no avail.
"It may be," Peninsula pondered, "that some bodies just aren't suited to hosting cloned souls."
"Mumsy says this whole 'soul thing' is just a phase I'm going through," Squitherington pouted. "But, really, if I can't have my beloved because of some silly thing that I wasn't even missing, that would just be red louses, wouldn't it?"
Do you mean "ridiculous?"
"That's what I said."
No, you sa - okay. Yes. That would just be red louses. Very red louses.