Chapter One
<br><br>My name is John Spencer, and I may very well be the last free man alive in this country…perhaps even in the world. I’m not normally prone to exaggeration, and so you can take my statements as literal truth. As bizarre and as outlandish what I am about to write may sound, I have embellished nothing, and not a single sentence is fantasy. Today I remain free. Free to laugh when I want to laugh, for as long as I want to laugh, and as loudly as it pleases me. Or not at all. And only I as a male, as far as I know, can make that assertion today. Naturally that is an egotistical belief, but arrogance now is part of the natural fuel that keeps me alive. And I dearly want to be able to find others like me, like you perhaps, who are reading this manuscript.
Two months, one week, four days, fourteen hours and fifty-three minutes ago, a plague, mutated far beyond its original intent, escaped into the general population, and there hasn’t been a single hour that I haven’t lived in fear since. I live in the tunnels of Philadelphia, mostly in the dark, without comfort, without companionship. Constant hunger and thirst are my traveling chums, and the darkness around me trembles with the faint screams of hysterical laughter. All the time. I mean, literally, all the time.
I don’t have all the facts by any means so most of my explanations are my best educated guesses. I have a lot of education, Ph.D.’s in biochemistry, physical engineering, and molecular biology – but none of that can help me now. My only achievements of note today are my intense desire to remain free, to take that next breath, and the Spencer family luck, a peculiar brand of happenstance that has served generations of my family before me. We just seem to have things work out for us. I always thought it was superstition, but if things somehow work out now, I’ll definitely be a believer.
So……the plague.
At Pharmogenetica, we had been working on a new biogenetic drug that enhanced the ability to feel and experience “pleasure” in human beings. This was not some idle and self-absorbed pubescent fantasy that we pursued, but a true scientific endeavor of great importance to the society at large. As you the reader knows, coming into the second half of the 21st century, the planet was experiencing a worldwide epidemic of depression, due to depleted levels of serotonin in the human blood, and an ongoing inability of the body to create any more. While many experts have postulated theories as to the cause, what little evidence I saw firsthand would seem to indicate that high levels of chemicals derived from the recreational pharmaceutical Extasee® had much to do with it. How they accreted within the body I do not know, and probably do not care. It had long been fact, and its effect is the important fact of note here.
We had devised a simulation concept that indicated we might be successful in reversing the loss of serotonin through the use of a carefully mutated bacterium to deliver carefully titrated amounts of a new pharmaceutical compound we had engineered through the planetary water systems. They had to be very dilute amounts because to ingest even an amount equivalent to a pinch of salt could result in almost immediate death by the rupturing of major vascular systems from the repeated violent spasms of continual, uncontrolled orgasms. The risk was high, so we were very careful in managing amounts and ratios. In minute amounts though, testing results were off the charts. People in the deepest of depressions, who suffered from almost complete sensory degradation, were transformed almost instantaneously into normal, happy, functioning human beings. Even orgasm was fully controlled, and while there were some reports of feelings of giddiness, laughing for no reason, and sudden intense urges by women to engage in the flirting foreplay of tickling their partners, we had no concern. After all, one really couldn’t even classify those as side effects, and certainly not as adverse in the strict sense of the word.
At least not until we began to release the bacteria into the water supply. We don’t know what happened really. It’s all just speculation and theory. The FDA had waved the standard testing period because results of the early studies had been so dramatic. There appeared to be absolutely no cause for concern at moving forward. Some believe there was a random intergenerational mutation within the bacteria population we used. Others believe it was a deliberate act of genetic sabotage by a disgruntled team member or jilted lover who was a key member of the project. But however it came to be, the results were virtually immediate and catastrophic.
Overnight, the social landscape of the country was completely changed. Women became dominant, and fanatically driven to tickle every man they could catch. However this mutation came to be, it changed their body chemistry so that their only ability to feel pleasure was through giving pleasure to the member of the opposite sex. But the mutation also altered the chemistry that shapes perception, and apparently the only way they could perceive they were giving pleasure was through the auditory feedback of hysterical laughter. The louder, longer and more panicked the better they felt. And it needed to be constant. They had to have a victim they could extract endless gales of laughter from within an hours reach. Without a victim, the loss of feeling pleasure was so intense; they were driven to suicide, or homicidal rages. I guess you could almost think of them as tickle zombies.
In nature’s dependable way, the mutation revealed an alteration of amazing, if not deadly, symbiotic dependence within the male. The male became ultra ticklish. The simple act of feeling one’s clothes brush the skin, or the light caress of a warm breeze could set a man off into rollicking fits of laughter. In the final evolutionary irony, the women soon discovered, as I was told, that if they seductively whispered “Tickle, Tickle, Tickle,” it could induce a hypnotic trance that drew her victim to her, rendering helpless to escape. I am alive today, or at the very least still sane and free, because my body does not apparently respond to the trancelike suggestiveness of the call. I am aware of heightened ticklishness, enough so that I quake in fear at the least thought of capture, but don’t collapse in a heap when my hair brushes my neck. I can control my giggling when a moth flutters near my neck. But I know that if even one long feminine fingernail was to slowly meander along the sole of my foot, madness would be very close by indeed. I am a prize of incalculable value to those women aboveground.
I am Laughter, fresh and unforced, waiting and reluctant to be coaxed forth.
Chapter 2
I am haunted by the memory of what I saw the day that I decided to escape my hiding place in the lab facility and trade it for the tunnels here which have so far kept me safe. To know I could end up like one of my three colleagues that day is enough to keep me vigilant.
I had to pass through the four floors of Metropolitan Hospital before I could get to the closest tunnel access. It was an extremely dangerous passage but the horror of it almost overwhelmed me. Every room had at least two men, arranged in a variety of positions and held by the myriad of traction ropes, cuffs, pulleys and metal bars. Bound in a number of places, they were completely exposed and virtually unable to move a muscle save the overworked diaphragm expanding and contracting their lungs in frantic pleas of hysteria. Loud screams, long chuffing hiccups of guffaws and machine – gun rattling of giggles filled and resounded through the ductwork I traveled. Everywhere I went I could hear the soft coos and “kitchy, kitchy coos” of these heartless vellicatrix mixing with the exhausted, despairing pleas constantly disrupted by copious flows of laughter.
If there’s a Hell, then I had stumbled into it.
Through the vents along my path, I could see the hallways bustling with blondes, brunette and red hair, bodies clothed in crisp starched nursing whites and blues, or short skirts, blouses, nylons and heels, or jeans and t-shirts. All moving with purpose and excitement, the nurses barking eager orders like, “Step aside, it’s time for their next treatment,” or “Tickling hours will be extended two hours tonight,” and even “No more than four ticklers with a patient at a time please.” Registered nurses moved from room to room administering medications meant to sustain the poor tickled men, or change their IV bags full of food and liquid nutrients. Only occasionally did they inject a sleeping medication, commenting, ”now, now ladies, he needs his rest if you’re going to tickle him tomorrow. I believe one of the men in 3444 North feels a bit neglected.” And the ticklers would show an almost feral, evil smile as they moved out of the room, unconsciously, even sensuously, wiggling their long-nailed fingers adorned in reds, pinks, plum and even black. Never had I seen such an array of long nails on display, and had it been any other circumstance, I’m sure I would have been extremely aroused; such is my preference for such things. But not that night.
I had made my way down to the Intensive Care Unit when I saw my three colleagues, and what I saw is difficult to recount. Each was in his own private, glassed-in unit, fully wired up to a bank of monitors and machinery. They were held, suspended, above the beds, and splayed out, naked and held taut by cables and straps. I noted a sign that said “Tickling Hours Limited to 10 minutes. Please observe the rules.” That brought me no consolation as I saw a long line, extending well down the hallway, of new visitors here to bring forced merriment to their ticklish ones, whether they knew them or not. And as I watched in mute horror, one group of 4 or 5 giggling females would leave a unit, and a fresh group would take their place, faces shining brightly with an almost feverish need, fingers wiggling and waggling as they entered the room.
I don’t know what kind of technique would be worse for me, but I’ve had many a nightmare about tens of slim, soft and tapered fingers, each with perfectly manicured long nails lightly trailing deliberate paths up my belly to my armpits and back down the sides, scratching, teasing and always tickling the last remnants of sanity from my mind as my tired muscles leaped and jerked with diminishing intensity.
I’ve imagined beautiful women lazily reclined at the head and foot of my bed, slowly and languorously scratching in my armpits and dancing across the bottoms of my feet and back up the tops to the toes, lingering in gentle ministrations at the base of my toes. Needless to say, I saw plenty of that type of technique, frozen in horror in my tenuous hiding place amidst the ductwork. But it wasn’t all I saw.
At the same time, there women who positioned themselves at the flanks of each suspended victim and dug their fingers into his sides, kneading the ribs one at a time with an almost religious fervor while uttering inanities like “I love playing a xylophone,” or “I’m not very good at counting – let me start again!” There were boxes and boxes of cotton swabs available at the Nursing stations, and many took advantage of the availability of these tools to tickly intently in the belly button or in the other soft cracks where flesh met flesh.
The men kept up a constant volley of squeals, gasps, giggles and loud belly laughs, until I thought I would surely go mad. And yet, strangely, they seemed to struggle little against the persistent probing, tickling fingers. I soon understood why when I overheard two nurses standing close to my vent, dispassionately discussing the general merits of the proper dosage of curare to keep the victims paralyzed, mercifully protecting them from muscle tearing and sprains that would otherwise occur with regularity from uncontrollable thrashing. “After all,” one smartly dressed nurse in blue remarked, “We’re not monsters, for heaven’s sake!”
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