Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

The ad went on to say that superior and inferior people alike ate such and such brand of peanut butter. Except that it wasn’t really peanut butter on that planet. It was Shazzbutter.

And so on.

And the peanut butter-eaters on earth were preparing to conquer the shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time, the Earthlings hadn’t just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again.

They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping, and determined that they were too numerous and proud and resourceful ever to allow themselves to be pioneered.

So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the majority in every respect.

And then the Earthling armored space ships came in and discovered the planet. Only token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so below average. And then the pioneering began.

Trout asked the happy manufacturer’s representative what it felt like to drive a Galaxie, which was the name of the car. The driver didn’t hear him, and Trout let it go. It was a dumb play on words, so that Trout was asking simultaneously what it was like to drive the car and what it was like to steer something like the Milky Way, which was one hundred thousand light-years in diameter and ten thousand light-years thick. It revolved once every two hundred million years. It contained about one hundred billion stars.

And then Trout saw that a simple fire extinguisher in the Galaxie had this brand name:

As far as Trout knew, this word meant higher in a dead language. It was also a thing a fictitious mountain climber in a famous poem kept yelling as he disappeared into a blizzard up above. And it was also the trade name for wood shavings which were used to protect fragile objects inside packages.

“Why would anybody name a fire extinguisher Excelsior?" Trout asked the driver.

The driver shrugged. “Somebody must have liked the sound of it,” he said.

Trout looked out at the countryside, which was smeared by high velocity. He saw this sign:

So he was getting really close to Dwayne Hoover. And, as though the Creator of the Universe or some other supernatural power were preparing him for the meeting, Trout felt the urge to thumb through his own book, Now It Can Be Told. This was the book which would soon turn Dwayne into a homicidal maniac.

The premise of the book was this: Life was an experiment by the Creator of the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He was thinking of introducing into the Universe. It was a creature with the ability to make up its own mind. All the other creatures were fully- programmed robots.

The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the creature and apologized for all the discomfort he had endured. The Creator invited him to a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of the WaldorfAstoria Hotel in New York City, where a black robot named Sammy Davis, Jr., would sing and dance.

And the experimental creature wasn’t killed after the banquet. He was transferred to a virgin planet instead. Living cells were sliced from the palms of his hands, while he was unconscious. The operation didn’t hurt at all.

And then the cells were stirred into a soupy sea on the virgin planet. They would evolve into ever more complicated life forms as the eons went by. Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will.

Trout didn’t give the experimental creature a proper name. He simply called him The Man.

On the virgin planet, The Man was Adam and the sea was Eve.

The Man often sauntered by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve. Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an invigorating swim. She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he would dive into an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain.

He screamed when he dived into the icy water, screamed again when he came up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when he scrambled up rocks to get out of the water.

He panted and laughed some more, and he thought of something amazing to yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell,

since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he was going to do next—and why. After a dip one day, for instance, The Man yelled this: “Cheese!”

Another time he yelled, “Wouldn’t you really rather drive a Buick?”

The only other big animal on the virgin planet was an angel who visited The Man occasionally. He was a messenger and an investigator for the Creator of the Universe. He took the form of an eight hundred pound male cinnamon bear. He was a robot, too, and so was The Creator, according to Kilgore Trout.

The bear was attempting to get a line on why The Man did what he did. He would ask, for instance, “Why did you yell, ‘Cheese’?”

And The Man would tell him mockingly, “Because I felt like it, you stupid machine.”

Here is what The Man’s tombstone on the virgin planet looked like at the end of the book by Kilgore Trout:

Bunny Hoover, Dwayne’s homosexual son, was dressing for work now. He was the piano player in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn. He was poor. He lived alone in a room without bath in the old Fairchild Hotel, which used to be fashionable. It was a flophouse now—in the most dangerous part of Midland City.

Very soon, Bunny Hoover would be seriously injured by Dwayne, would soon share an ambulance with Kilgore Trout.

Bunny was pale, the same unhealthy color of the blind fish that used to live in the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave. Those fish were extinct. They had all turned belly-up years ago, had been flushed from the cave and into the Ohio River—to turn belly-up, to go bang in the noonday sun.

Bunny avoided the sunshine, too. And the water from the taps of Midland City was becoming more poisonous every day. He ate very little. He prepared his own food in his room. The preparation was simple, since vegetables and fruits were all he ate, and he munched them raw.

He not only did without dead meat—he did without living meat, too, without friends or lovers or pets. He had once been highly popular. When he was at Prairie Military Academy, for instance, the student body was unanimous in electing him Cadet Colonel, the highest rank possible, in his senior year.

When Bunny played the piano bar at the Holiday Inn, he had many, many secrets. One of them was this: he wasn’t really there. He was able to absent himself from the cocktail lounge, and from the planet

itself, for that matter, by means of Transcendental Meditation. He learned this technique from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who once stopped off in Midland City during a world-wide lecture tour.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in exchange for a new handkerchief, a piece of fruit, a bunch of flowers, and thirty-five dollars, taught Bunny to close his eyes, and to say this euphonious nonsense word to himself over and over again: “Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem.” Bunny sat on the edge of his bed in the hotel room now, and he did it. “Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem,” he said to himself-internally. The rhythm of the chant matched one syllable with each two beats in his heart. He closed his eyes. He became a skin diver in the depths of his mind.