The Chicken's in the Cradle

by Wuckster

My father thought the Toad King was for chumps and that the Toadies who believed in it were a bunch of delusional fanatics. He decided to start his own religion and thus began construction of the Temple of the Immortal Chicken Emperor. I was five at the time and more interested in the construction robots that were building the thing than the slowly emerging likeness of a giant stone chicken foot. My father planned to build an enormous chicken statue that would be visible from all three moons of J'Hendar. He spared no expense and got the most state of the art bots on the market. Such was his devotion to the Chicken Emperor that he paid extra to have the construction bots look like chickens. That's what kind of fascinated me when I was a kid. He even went so far as to have them put mechanical wattles on the chicken's necks. I'm not sure if they served any practical function, but my father insisted on them.

My grandfather got super rich running a smuggling operation during the Mathematician Wars, but he died of Andromedan Syphilis when my father was still a teenager, leaving him the entirety of his fortune. My father had never had a real job in his life, but he did have vast amounts of time and money on his hands. Apparently a Toadie waiter gave him sub-par service at a restaurant one time and that was the start of his intense obsession with making a bigger and better religion. I'm not sure what got him so fixated on chickens, but he really bought into it. He even took to wearing chicken pajamas in public later in life. When my little sister was born, he insisted on dressing her in a chicken onesie.

When I turned fifteen, my father sent me off to boarding school on Alpheon, the third and smallest moon of J'Hendar. I wanted to go to school at Pfellibus Academy on the big moon, since they were known for their excellent theater program, but my father said that damn place was overrun with those blasted Toadies and no son of his was going to be brainwashed by those weirdos.

In the ten years since construction had started, both of the legs of the giant chicken statue had been completed and preliminary work was starting on the chicken's butt. It probably would have been a little further along, but my father had halted work twice to order an entirely new squadron of construction robots when the company that made them came out with a newer model with slightly more realistic looking mechanical wattles. Say what you will about my father, but he definitely wasn't one to overlook even the tiniest of details.

Going to school on Alpheon, I can confirm that the statue was not visible from there. At least not yet. The school was located on the side of the moon that was tidally locked to J'Hendar, so it wasn't like I didn't have ample opportunity to look for it. But it wasn't even halfway built at that point, so it was possible it might become visible someday. I kept looking for it, but I never spotted it.

The school on Alpheon was primarily known for churning out accountants, and I didn't want anything to do with that. I'd always dreamed of being an actor, but there wasn't any theater program at all at this school. So that was when I founded the Alpheon Accounting Academy Drama Club. We managed to get a grand total of five members, counting myself. One of them was even a girl, which was pretty impressive if I say so myself, since there were only like three girls in the whole school. For some reason a lot of girls didn't seem to want to become accountants. Siennia actually did want to be an accountant, but she'd also been bitten by the acting bug since appearing in a commercial for a local furniture store when she was a kid, so she signed up immediately when I hung up a flyer on the bulletin board in the main hallway. The other three guys weren't really all that into acting, but signed up for the Drama Club anyway as a way to meet chicks.

The school didn't give us any budget at all to get the rights for actual plays, so I took it upon myself to write my own scripts. I'll admit I was pretty dumb and naive at the time and I'd spent most of my life listening to my father's rants, so I wrote a lengthy diatribe about the greatness of the Immortal Chicken Emperor and that the Almighty Toad King was a fraud and that all Toadies were a bunch of ignorant fools who should be forced to work in the pepper mines of Gx'Tal XIV.

When I told my father what my play was about, he got super excited and immediately offered to send one of his construction bots to build the set for us. Since the school hadn't allocated us any money for set construction, and I had been planning on using cardboard boxes, I agreed. My father also insisted on a shopping excursion at the Grand Mall on Pfellibus so that we would have the finest costumes of any production ever staged. He also rented the most expensive lighting rig on all of J'Hendar, but he forgot to hire someone who actually knew how to operate it. We didn't realize this oversight until opening night. By this time it was too late for my father to fly anyone in from the main planet, and he was adamant that there be no delays in broadcasting my masterpiece to the public. In the end, he cleared out the local hardware store of their supply of high-powered flashlights. Then he spotted a bunch of townies drinking grog on a street corner and offered to buy them a keg if they'd stand in the back of the room and shine the flashlights at the actors. They were already a little drunk by this point, so the lights kind of wandered around the stage in a wobbly fashion. It was probably pretty amateurish, but I'd like to think it came across as a bold artistic decision.

We actually managed to pack the auditorium on opening night, which turned out to be closing night as well. Truthfully, "auditorium" isn't really the best word for the venue. It was actually a classroom that wasn't being used at that particular hour, and it only seated about thirty people, so the fact that we sold out isn't really as impressive as it might sound. The principal of the school was one of the people in attendance, and it turned out he was actually a hardcore fundamentalist Toadie. Needless to say, he was not amused. He shut down the Drama Club effective immediately and threatened to have me expelled. My father got in his face and threatened to stick so many lawsuits on the school that their top accounting students wouldn't be able to figure out a way to get the budget out of the red. A shouting match ensued, some harsh words were exchanged, and there were even a few shoves back and forth before a third year accounting student named Marvin managed to break up the fight by inserting his three hundred and fifty pound frame between my father and the principal.

After a little while, cooler heads prevailed. My father agreed not to sue the school and the principal allowed me to stay on the condition that the Drama Club was no more. He didn't say as much, but I also ended up on his "watch list." He took a super special interest in me after that, although I tried my best to maintain a low profile for a while. I also kept finding Toad King literature in my mailbox after that, but I would just crumble that nonsense up and throw it on the ground. I took to wearing a chicken pin on my shirt as an act of resistance after that. Some of my fellow students noticed it and asked me what it was all about, so I started telling them about the Immortal Chicken Emperor and pretty soon they started wearing chicken pins, too. We were building our own little chicken army at the Alpheon Accounting Academy. This did not escape the notice of the principal as he announced over the intercom that anyone caught wearing a chicken pin would be given Saturday detentions for the rest of the year. I stopped wearing my pin, but then I took to wearing a cape with a big chicken embroidered on the back of it. It was a couple days after that when the attempt on my life took place.

I was having some serious trouble keeping my eyes open during a particularly boring lecture on the History of Medieval Accounting when what I initially took to be a two-headed dragonfly flew in through the window and started hovering around my head. I held out my finger, hoping it would land there, but just as it was about to make contact I noticed the little red blinking light. I pushed away from the table in front of me as hard as I could, which caused my chair to tilt backwards and I fell to the floor. This almost certainly saved my life as the tiny robot detonated with a small but powerful explosion right where my face had been a few seconds before. The teacher tried to assign me extra homework for disrupting his class, but I told him he could shove his extra homework right up the principal's Toadie crack and stormed out of the room. I ran to the nearest vid-phone and called my father. He was outraged and told me he'd send a private space shuttle for me immediately to take me home. He also swore there would be unfathomable legal litigation. That marked the end of my time at boarding school.

My father hooked me up with a job as a minister of propaganda for the Immortal Chicken Emperor. He said I had shown an aptitude for such work with my play and my organized rebellion at school and that he liked the cut of my jib. A few of my classmates had quit school as an act of solidarity and I got my father to hire them on as junior accountants for the Church.

Things were pretty good for a while after that. I volunteered for a couple missionary expeditions to the outer planets to spread the word of the Chicken Emperor. It was on my second trip to the planet N'Ishkabal that I began to grow skeptical of my father's religion. I was twenty years old at this point and I fell in love with a girl who was a radicalized atheist social activist. She introduced me to the intoxicating powers of Flooberian Herb and played me the music of the folk protest singer Rocket "Salamander" Robinson on her vintage stereophonic victrola. We would take hits off the bong and make out on the couch for hours while I listened to his highly informative lyrics about all the ways we were being kept down and lied to by "The Man." I wasn't sure who this man was exactly, but he sounded like a real jackhole and I was pretty certain I didn't like him.

I let my hair get long and attempted to grow out my beard, but it came in all patchy and wispy like peach fuzz. My girlfriend Shavonda said she liked it though, so I kept it. I stopped wearing my chicken cape though after she lectured me about how it was a symbol of oppression and, even worse, bourgeoisie. She wore her hair in long nappy dreadlocks and didn't shave any of her body hair. I thought she was gorgeous. She was the first girl I ever kissed and also the first girl to break my heart. She dumped me one day for some guy with a lot of tribal tattoos who made pottery and rode a hover-cycle. She said that she loved me but he had the soul of an artist and she couldn't deny the truth of what her heart was dictating to her. I cried a lot during the following weeks and it was quite some time before I allowed myself to be vulnerable enough to fall in love again, but I don't regret the time I spent with her. She really opened my mind up to a lot of things, not least of which was the fact that my father's religion was probably bunk.

She had lectured me many times about the evil of money and how anyone who had it was a scumbag whose sole purpose in life was to keep good, authentic people down. I didn't think my father was evil or a scumbag, even though he had a lot of money, but I did begin to suspect that he was a little misguided. I mean, you had to admit the idea of some Immortal Chicken Emperor was pretty ridiculous if you thought about it. Where was this Chicken Emperor supposed to exist anyway? Out in space somewhere? News flash: we'd been to space and there were no chickens out there. Yes, we'd encountered a civilization of giant hostile lobster men who were bent on our utter destruction, but there were no chickens with god-like powers out there. No Toad Kings either for that matter. I began to suspect all religions really were a lie to control people. I decided to hop the first space shuttle back to J'Hendar and tell my father about the realization I'd had.

This didn't go over as well as I had hoped. My father disowned me. He wrote me out of his will and left everything to my little sister, who was proving to be a much more devoted disciple of the Chicken Emperor. She had invented a whistle that replicated the chicken's most passionate mating bawk and had managed to increase egg productivity by ten percent. My father told me he never wanted to see me again and spat on the ground in disgust.

I wound up kicking around different planets for the next few years. I spent some time on the tundra moon of Gx'Tal XIII where I fell in with a bunch of anarchists who thrived on acts of random destruction. I learned how to build a drone bomb like the one that almost took me out back in boarding school. I blew up a marshmallow factory just for kicks and got hooked on the thrill of explosives. I got really skilled at building high-tech bombs. Shortly after that a bunch of guys dressed only in speedos tried to recruit me into their terrorist cell. I was pretty convinced that life was meaningless at this point and the only joy I found was in blowing stuff up. I wasn't really down with their cause, which apparently had something to do with a fervent refusal to bathe, but they did promise me ample opportunities to "blast shit into smithereens." So I joined their ranks.

One day when I was approaching thirty I got the call that my talents were needed for a really big job. I packed up all my biggest and best explosives, stripped down to my speedos and boarded a spaceship. The destination was top secret, but I didn't really care where we were going. I had one job to do and I intended to do it well. I was joined in the transport hold by dozens of other surly looking men, all wearing nothing but speedos, the official uniform of terrorists everywhere. Some old dude sat across from me and started giving me funny looks, but I ignored him as I didn't have time for his nonsense. The ship was about to blast off and I had to make sure I was buckled in tightly.

The trip was uneventful and we arrived at our destination a couple days later. I gathered up my kit and made my way to deboard the spacecraft. I stepped out into a huge crowd of people who were all staring at some gigantic object that was covered in an enormous white blanket. I'm really not sure where they found enough fabric to make a blanket that big as whatever it was covering looked to be about the size of a mountain. I was pretty sure that this object was probably the target of our attack. There were fireworks going off everywhere and numerous spotlights shining on the object. Apparently this was some sort of celebration. Suddenly all the lights went out and a giant holographic image appeared in the sky overhead. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as I recognized the face of my father towering up above me.

A booming voice seemed to come out of everywhere around me as I heard my father proudly announce the unveiling of the Temple of the Immortal Chicken Emperor. The enormous blanket fell to the ground in a massive heap, revealing the completed giant chicken statue underneath. A loud cheer arose in the crowd, even as I felt increasingly sick to my stomach. I heard someone shout out "Death to the infidel!" right next to me. I turned and saw the old guy who had been staring at me on the spaceship. He had a large toad tattoo on his upper arm that I just noticed for the first time. I looked at him closer and it suddenly dawned on me where I recognized him from. It was the principal from the Alpheon Accounting Academy. I wasn't sure what had happened to him since I left the school, but he hadn't aged well, and apparently somewhere along the line he had hooked up with a bunch of terrorists. To be fair, so had I.

I don't even remember consciously tackling him to the ground, but the next thing I knew I had his wrists pinned beneath my knees. He struggled for a few minutes but then stopped suddenly and burst out in a peal of awful laughter. I asked him what was so funny, but he just kept on laughing. I shook him vigorously by the neck and swore I wouldn't use my explosives on my father's life-long passion project, even if he did disown me. The principal wheezed and then started repeating over and over again that it was too late. I asked him what it was too late for. Then he asked me if I thought I was the only explosives expert the terrorists had brought along. He cackled maniacally as I slowly released my grip on him. I turned around just in time to hear the bombs go off. I saw the gigantic chicken statue, the culmination of years of my father's dreams, suddenly morph into a pile of rubble, which soon kicked up an enormous dust cloud that blanketed the crowd. I dropped to my knees and let the dust fall over me until I began to cough hysterically. That was the moment I renounced both terrorism and nihilism. I wasn't sure if I could ever forgive my father for his extreme overreaction when I expressed doubt about his made up religion, and I certainly couldn't bring myself to worship his fictional chicken god, but something in me broke when I saw that statue get destroyed. At the same time I think something woke up in me as well. I heard the nasty laughter of my former principal coming from behind me. I turned around and decked him in the jaw as hard as I could. He stopped laughing after that.

I managed to make my way through the chaos and confusion of the crowd and the massive piles of destruction until I reached what used to be the base of the statue. I found my father there looking bewildered as he stood there covered in dust and ash. His hair was disheveled and his clothes were hanging off him in tatters. He was blinking his eyes rapidly and mumbling to himself. My little sister was nearby and she ran up and threw her arms around me as soon as she spotted me. There were tears pouring down her eyes, but I wiped them away and told her everything was going to be okay, even though I wasn't sure that was true.

I got closer to my father and asked him if he was all right. He didn't really acknowledge me but kept mumbling something about twenty-five years. I shook him and asked me if he knew who I was. He said of course he did with a wave of his hand. How could he not recognize his only son? Then he went back to mumbling about twenty-five years.

I put my hand on his shoulder as I realized he was lamenting the twenty-five years he had spent building that statue only to have it fall to pieces in a matter of seconds. It wasn't even around long enough to learn if it had actually been visible from the moons. Twenty-five years, he mumbled again. Then he perked up noticeably as he stroked his chin thoughtfully. He said with the advancements in robot technology during that time he could probably build an even bigger and better statue in half that time if he started working right away. Then he asked me if I'd like my old job back as minister of propaganda. I told him I wasn't sure if I could do that again, but I'd be happy to throw on a pair of work gloves, grab a shovel and assist the construction bots in any way I could. He told me the mechanical wattles were more realistic than ever now and also had the ability to shoot lasers. I told him that was absolutely fantastic.

Oh yeah, I'm also auditioning for a play in J'Hendar City next week. Wish me luck, or I guess as they say in the theater, tell me to break a leg. If I've learned one thing, it's that crazy dreams really can come true. My father taught me that.