The Adventures of Jimmy the Soul Pt. 1

The Adventures of Jimmy the Soul

         Jimmy was a soul. That was to say, he was a collective consciousness that traveled without a body, and simply inhabited others on all sorts of different planets in all sorts of different dimensions in all sorts of different universes. Needless to say, he traveled a lot like this, but he had one major disadvantage: whenever he entered a planet’s atmosphere, he had no time to observe what life was like there before he was sucked into a body. The bodies were like magnets to him, and whenever he entered a populated planet it made him feel like shit on a stick as he was stretched in a hundred thousand different ways until he was finally slung unceremoniously into a body.
         This was most unfortunate, as the body didn’t even have to belong to the dominant life form of that planet. Sometimes he ended up as some insignificant insect about to be smashed on the bottom of somebody’s heel.
         However, he wasn’t quite sure if it was worse ending up as the dominant life form or one of the many others. Sometimes he ended up as a soldier in the middle of a gigantic battle. Sometimes he wound up tied to a speeding aircraft.
         His first time jumping into somebody’s body he fell into a man who was universally hated for his vegetable preferences. At the moment he entered him, he was being tied to a pole.
         “Fucking gadder!”  mumbled one of the men tying him up to the pole.
         “I say we flork him,” said another.
         “Let’s just get this over with, I got Gelbara homework to do,” said a third.
         “Hey, what’s going on?” Jimmy mumbled.
         “Holy shit! I thought you had him sedated!”
         “I did!”
         “Quick! Put him out!”
         “There’s no time! Let’s just do it now!”
         “Fine!”
         “Do what?” Jimmy asked.
         He watched in horror as all three pulled large, sharp, stick-like weapons out of bags on the ground and advanced towards him.
         
……
         
                “Shit.”
                As Jimmy was mercilessly beaten and torn, he thought to himself, “This is one fucking planet I’m never coming to again.”

                So, his luck wasn’t exactly phenomenal. Turns out, there were only two types of societies in the universe. He called them Aramice societies and Veliamed societies. They were phrases he picked up from different planets around the vastness of everything.
                  In all honesty, they weren’t very different. It wasn’t like one was big and one was small. It wasn’t like one was murderous and one was peaceful. It was all a matter of classes. One of them was extremely segregated and one of them was slightly less segregated. Jimmy still wanted to find a utopian society, but he was beginning to lose hope. It seemed that all there was in the universe was shitty and shittier living conditions.
                  Aramice societies were the better of the two. They had rich and poor and medium classes, and the rich controlled everything but themselves. The poor tried to stop the rich from controlling everything, but the rich tricked the poor into thinking they were helping them and the poor were content and settled down until the next generation came along and repeated steps one and two.
                  Veliamed societies were the worse of the two. They had rich and poor and filthy rich. The rich and filthy rich were practically the same, and they controlled everything, including themselves. Subjugation was as common as people. The poor got pissed off at the rich, and tried to revolt, but the rich slapped their wrists and said ‘no’, and the poor settled back down unhappily until the next generation came along and repeated steps one and two.
                  No, they weren’t very different at all.
                  They both had their pros and cons, though. For instance, in Veliamed societies, the poor knew they had no chance to make things better for everybody, but in Aramice societies the poor were tricked into thinking they could make things better through multiple devices. In Aramice societies, people sought intelligence and creativity, but in Veliamed societies the simple structure of society decided they were better off without it and promptly:
    -destroyed
    -erased
    -vaporized
    -clubbed
    -shot
    -decapitated
                  Anybody who tried to seek such endeavors.
                  So Jimmy wasn’t exactly stoked about continuing after his fifth time being beaten and fed to the lions and sharks. It was fairly easy getting away. One thing Jimmy had learned was that all successful star systems were perfectly horizontal, or damn close to it. Granted, direction in space is an illusion, but for him horizontal in space meant ‘in line with everything else relatively close to it’. For all star systems that had planets barreling around it like electrons around a nucleus were pretty much doomed from the start. The poor creatures who inhabited those planets would start out their measly little lives and begin to evolve when all of the sudden…
                    SMACK!
                    Some planet came flying into theirs, and the explosion almost instantly destroyed everyone on that planet…or both planets.
                    It was very tragic.
                    So Jimmy flew up in what might be called a vertical direction, escaping the magnetic pull of all the bodies in the planets around him and lay in space a while. He was the closest to being immortal it’s possible to be, and was only technically not immortal because of his constant deaths at the hands of several cultures. So he just lay there in space, taking a break. He began to see the flaws of immortality, in that sometimes you just want to give up…and he had wanted to give up for three hundred years. In essence, he was simulating death. He just lay in space, not doing anything, or thinking anything, steering clear of inhabited planets, just floating in the vastness of space. It was kind of like sitting on a beach, just tanning, hoping to god you weren’t going to get skin cancer and get all blotchy, because that would look shitty at the night clubs you were preparing for. It was kind of ironic, actually, how in trying to accomplish one thing you could actually accomplish the exact opposite, and then…
                      NO!
                      He was thinking too much. This was about not thinking, just lying down and being dead for a change. He drifted along for a while. Then he began to see the irony in this. He had already died thousands of times, and here he was trying to act dead. But then, he didn’t exactly know what it was like to feel the consequences of death, if it was just a quiet blackness or a techno rave complete with suspicious punch and candy bags. Or maybe he was dead. Maybe death is really immortality, which would put the final ironic cap on it all, especially for the suicidal who were trying to escape existence, because in so doing they would actually be thrust to immortality.
                        It was kind of like tanning.
                        Suddenly things seemed very ironic to Jimmy. It was ironic that people took all these little precautions to make others think highly of them, yet it was truly a pain in the ass and was only wearing them down, and yet it was making them happy, or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was only leading them to unhappiness, or maybe it didn’t matter since they all wound up dead anyway. Or maybe…
                        NO!
                        He was thinking too much again. He really wasn’t doing so good at this. He had to try harder. Quietly, he shut down and lay in space. He actually succeeded this time, and lay in space being absolutely quiet and still.
                        And that’s when an armada of starships passed right through him.
                        It was the final irony.