Category: Undead Celebrities

Dec. 1, 2151
AUCKLAND–Eccentric software trillionaire Larry Ellison sank earlier today in deep waters off the New Zealand coast during practice sprints for this year’s America’s Cup. Safety officials immediately organized a search, but hold out little hope of discovering and raising Ellison in time to avoid irreparable damage. “The seas are just too rough to mount a sufficiently rapid recovery operation,” explained Royal New Zealand Coastguard spokesperson Greta Oz. “From what I understand, many of his vital systems cannot withstand more than a few hours of submersion at that pressure. We have been transmitting warnings about severe seas for the past week, but Mr. Ellison chose not to heed them.”

Ellison has been a controversial figure in the sailing world ever since his first bid six years ago to become the first human/yacht hybrid to compete in the prestigious America’s Cup. “Larry has always been a pioneer,” points out America’s Cup Executive Director Harry Shaboul. “Some of us thought he was going too far. But, I guess, it eventually had to happen. By getting acceptance from the Board, Larry has paved the way for competition on equal footing between cyborg systems and traditional human crews.”

Ellison has been living as a yacht for the past seven years. In the spring of 2143, after a series of groundbreaking surgeries spanning several months, Ellison embarked upon his maiden voyage along the California coast. Ellison’s organic body, encased in Lucite, suspended in an oxygen-rich gel bath, and wired into the adaptive network that navigates and maintains the ship, was, upon his instruction, mounted as a figurehead on the yacht’s cutwater. “The view is incredible,” exclaimed Ellison at a press conference shortly after his launch. “I feel at one with the ship, at one with the sea.”

“Larry didn’t make it easy on us,” noted Dr. Frieda Umphal, Ellison’s lead medical expert. “He insisted that he be visible as the figurehead, and that he be wearing one of his trademark suits. Working with his tailors we managed to do it for him, to get a suit designed that satisfied his wishes but that didn’t interfere with the possibly indefinite artificial support of his body.”

Through an interface with on-board navigational equipment and servo-mechanical sail and rudder control systems, Ellison was able to sail without a crew. Though satellite arrays kept him connected to world networks, he often enjoyed the more intimate contact he could have with passengers. “It’s a unique feeling, to be able to carry someone, a friend, on your back, or in your body, across the waves,” explained Ellison in a rare interview last year. “I’m often reminded of the story of Jonah and the whale. There’s something divine about the experience, something sacred.”

Reached at his mountain retreat, long-time Ellison friend and rival Steve Jobs expressed his concern over Ellison’s disappearance: “This is tragic. I tried to warn him about this yacht business. I mean, I thought he was going too far when he had that gene treatment to become ‘Japanese.’ Still, he’ll be missed.”

Others have suggested that the loss was avoidable. “There was a flaw in Larry’s design,” explained the leader of his land-based crew. “But it was typically Larry: not afraid of risks. He insisted on storing all of his functions and routines on a central server on board. It helped him ‘identify’ with his new body he said. We tried to encourage him to consider a more distributed model, but he wouldn’t listen. ‘I don’t want copies of myself spread all over the network where any bozo can tinker with them,’ he said. ‘It’s stupid and it’s inefficient. If people want to interact with me they can do it through thin clients.'”

“We’re all very concerned,” notes Dr. Umphal. “And we’re right to be concerned. But it’s not hopeless. His ego was designed to serve as a flotation device.”

April 23, 2022
NEW YORK CITY–The recent arrest of former suicide artist Bran McGeady has galvanized suspicions in the suicide art world that the genre has become too popular to be effectively monitored for fraud and forgery. The recently celebrated McGeady was discovered by NEA officers during a routine serial-number trace of pawned audio and video equipment in Fairfield Outer-Borough. “Apparently he pretty desperately needed to raise some funds,” explains Sergeant McNee Tracey. “It looks like his replacement identity wasn’t well-capitalized, so he pawned some of the Endowment equipment he had taken into hiding with him.”

Patrons of the McGeady Suicide Cooperative are universally scandalized to discover that McGeady is still alive and that the performance they sponsored was a forgery. “I’m shocked,” exclaims Aiken Petral III, one of the key shareholders in the Cooperative. “We dedicated billions of dollars to our sponsorship of Bran, to the parties, the successful finance career we arranged for him, the best education, the extravagant lifestyle…all of the potential we put into that kid, I just can’t believe that he wouldn’t end it all as we had contractually arranged.”

NEA officials are quick to point out that this is the first known case of fraud in the still young industry. “We don’t want suicide art to get a bad reputation in the market,” explains NEA spokesman Henry Chuff. “There’s still lots of protection for those thinking about investing in a suicide artist. SACA [the Suicide Artists’ Certification Agency] offers a relatively inexpensive way to insure the authenticity of your artist’s work. In fact, McGeady was fully bonded by SACA, guaranteeing nearly 100% reimbursement for shareholders.”

The NEA has good reason to want to reassure public confidence in suicide art. In the seventeen short years since Cynthia Fern’s legendary performance pioneered the genre, suicide art and suicide artists have generated more revenue attributable to artistic endeavor than the sum of all arts spending for the past 350 years. “The financial success of suicide art is really unprecedented in the art world,” explains Columbia University Professor Reginald Coale. “It’s something on an industrial scale, and it came not a minute too late for art. Technical advances in media have always altered the form and cultural meaning of art, but no significantly marketable value filled the vacuum left when artisanship and genius were made redundant by digital and nano-reproductive media. It’s ironic in a way: the last thing that artists have to offer us is suicide.”

Debate about the value of suicide art continues, despite the tremendous economic growth surrounding it. “The popular success of suicide art isn’t really much of a mystery,” contends Times critic Denise Pruple. “Medical technologies have made death a scarce commodity. Production, information, and transportation technology has given us efficiency on scales unimaginable even sixty years ago. Like the potlatches of old, suicide art announces an abundance so great that, to declare its value, it must be wasted. So, suicide art coops sponsor for these artists lives and careers of extravagant wealth and social status precisely in order to see them wasted. It makes perfect sense.”

“I don’t care about the money,” complains McGeady Cooperative shareholder Vincent Eggs. “I found Bran’s suicide very moving. The hush in the theater as he breathed his last breath; that was incredibly intense. To find out now that it was all a lie really hurts. I don’t know if they can, but I’m encouraging the prosecution to treat this as a capital offense. That’s the only thing that will make what he did all right.”

Oct. 21, 2188
AIKEN SC–Former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond today emerged from more than 180 years in hiding and revealed that, according to his staff of personal physicians, he is the first human to permanently defeat death. For more than a century Senator Thurmond has lived secreted in a hyperbarric, orgone-accumulating subterranean greenhouse buried beneath the Russell Senate Building in Washington DC.

“I drank out of this big hamster-like bottle,” joked the wiry Senator. “I drew the line at having those woodchips on the floor, though.”

His medical team reported through a spokeswoman that the treatment had aimed both to halt the aging process, and to restore some degree of fitness and mental competence to the then centenarian. “In Strom we arrested the aging process by, for the first time, eliminating the shortening of the telomeres in each of his cells. Cancerous cells achieve a perverse and hyperactive immortality through the same mechanism. We, essentially, transformed Strom into a large cancer with the shape and qualities of a human being.”

When asked by reporters why he had waited until now to come forward, Senator Thurmond cited concerns about giving false hopes to his many admirers and former constituents: “When I left public life, I left on a high note, at the top of my game. I was loved. I think I might have been bigger than those Beatles. I didn’t want to tease people by sayin’ now I might live forever. You might never lose me. And then not be able to follow through.”

Several public health and advocacy groups have voiced concern over the treatment Senator Thurmond received. At a recent public hearing, Local Health Coven #32 director Agnes Bar demanded a public accounting of the funds used to support Senator Thurmond’s extraordinary and lengthy treatment. “Some sources have told us that the funding came out of the NSA budget. And why aren’t the doctors identified? They seem only to speak collectively through a PR representative. It sounds like they are the same doctors that started his treatment. At least they talk that way. If so we suspect that they have been giving themselves the experimental treatment as well. That’s not good medicine.”

It may not be good science either. Prominent science and research organizations have universally criticized the methodology of the long-secret experiment. The team’s information gathering and safety protocols seem to have been particularly lax. Often Senator Thurmond was sustained in his automatic environment for decades at a time with neither close monitoring nor human contact.

Thurmond’s doctors acknowledge the shortcomings of the experiment, but point to the results for justification: “Senator Thurmond now tests significantly higher on a range of physical and intelligence tests, and psychometric indicators of his mental stability have improved by orders of magnitude.”

What did the Senator do to occupy his years in recuperative solitude? “I did some light readin’. There was room for my library of old Sears & Roebuck catalogs. I never get tired of reading them. If I got bored I’d flip through my collection of lynchin’ photos. And the Bible too. I also had some movies. Mostly Charlton Heston. Ben Hur, I love that movie.”