The Amazing Mistra

Benny squeezed his slender fingers through his perfect, feathery black hair.

Ten years ago he would have pressed his thick fingers against his bald head, but no, this was the future.  A past wife made him get both liposuction and replacement hair, and it was hard to argue about it when both came free with his value meal. 

Benny had liked that bald spot.  It had character.  His chubby fingers had character.  His newspaper had character.

Okay, so his newspaper didn't have character.  It at least had dignity...in its own alien probing, cow missing, bat people, sea monster, and bizarre celebrity kind of way.

Okay, so it didn't...but it was his paper, damn it!  Now he had a press room staff that he could hardly recognize.  Well, he couldn’t really recognize them in the past either, due to his poor vision, but eye surgery allowed him to now see them all perfectly.  He preferred them blurry.   

His staff waited expectantly.  Benny gave a small sigh, and then in a firm voice demanded,

"Okay...what hasn't been proven yet?"

As the senior editor of the newspaper questioned his loyal staff (he knew they were loyal because the small device on the desk told him so...although Mitch was beginning to slip into yellow) he absentmindedly glanced up at the framed 'Loch Ness Monster' article up on the wall.  Back in the day, he ran that article two times a year for thirty years in a row, making only a few variations each time.  The job was a lot easier back then.  All you had to do was stick a blurry picture on the front page, along with the headline,

‘STARTLING NEW EVIDENCE OF SEA MONSTERS IN LOCH NESS’

You couldn’t really sell that kind of story anymore, not when the Loch Nessians had a seat in the U.N.  You couldn’t call them monsters either.  You’d get sued.

Mitch, the intern (and only other complete human at the table), was the first to raise his hand,

"Mistra Petra Vera was..."

There was a collective groan from the other ten people (and four non-people) at the meeting.  Benny slammed his fist down upon the floating disk that served as the meeting room table and shouted,

"No more Mistra stories!  The public is sick of her!  It doesn't matter how depraved, immoral or theoretically impossible her antics are, the public doesn't want to hear about it!"

Marie, the token office hologram, raised a slightly transparent finger, and the small floating sphere inside her emitted,

"June's issue, with the expose on Mistra's weekend marriage to a planet sized alien, was our biggest seller of the year so far!  People love hearing about Mistra, even if they hate her."

Damn it, Benny knew it was true.  It was like last year, when his special report:

'Faces on Mars, Not the Ones That Aliens Admit to Making, but Different Ones'

was overshadowed by a trashy article about Mistra getting drunk and allowing one thousand microscopic nano-bots to have their way with her. 

Basically, they just measured her core temperature and mapped her nasal cavity, but the headline sounded dirty enough to help the issue sell out.     

Torp, the only halfway decent reporter in the entire floating building, raised one of his twenty identical pink fingers and relayed directly into everyone's minds,

"I didn't want to bring up the subject of Mistra, but I do have substantial proof that she personally deflowered the entire graduating class of the Verulian academy, men and women alike."

There was a slightly exited murmur among the group, until Marie pointed out,

"Verulians are plant creatures.  Trimming, watering and deflowering them was part of the community service she had to do for going back in time.”

Time travel was erratic, unpredictable, dangerous and ludicrously illegal, but they lowered the charges when the only apparent change to the timeline that Mistra had made was somehow getting her face on the hundred dollar bill.

Mitch asked, curiously,

"How'd she do it?"

"That's between her and Franklin."

"No, no, I mean how does the flower removal work?  Did she use gardening tools?"

Torp beamed an image directly into everyone's minds.  Mitch whistled.  Marie's mouth dropped.  Benny winced.  Everyone was quiet until one of the robotic assistants added, 

"Oh...uh...that's quite an interesting way of...yes, I do believe that will sell."

Benny slammed his fist on the table once more.  It would have taken a thousand tons to move the disk a single inch, but he liked the sound his hand made when he struck it.  He glanced over his silent staff and announced, as he usually did at the meetings.

"I didn't raise this company up from nothing just to record the antics of a half-alien hussy!"

Mistra wasn't naturally half alien, but she always seemed to have some kind of small symbiotic creature attached to her, usually with a big smile upon its face.

"When I started this business up, we ran stories about bat children, robotic dopplegangers, and secret terrorist dinosaur breeding programs!"

Torp nodded two of his eye stalks, and pointed out,

"Yes, and it was all true!  You were hailed as a genius, sir..."

"BUT IT WASN'T MEANT TO BE TRUE!  IT WAS SILLY AND STUPID AND FUN!  THAT'S WHAT IT'S..."

He stared at the group in the room.  They were humoring him.  They knew it wasn't true.  Hell, even Benny knew it wasn't true. 

It was never about being silly, stupid and fun, it was about selling newspapers.  It was always about selling newspapers, and Bigfoot sightings were no longer interesting now that every single square inch of the planet was being simultaneously recorded, allowing everyone to clearly see that monster trucks simply didn't exist anymore.

"Forget it...just forget it."

Benny patted his perfectly reconstructed scalp, and with a dismissive wave of his hand, announced,

"Run the Mistra story...pull together some weaker stuff to follow it up...we'll regroup next issue...oh and congratulations, you two."

He didn't have to point out who he was talking to.  Marie blushed as Torp extended a tentacle around her holographic body.  Her inner sphere reflexively emitted enough energy to give his arm the sensation of touching the side of a body.  A holographic ring was around one of her fingers. 

Benny smiled.  Who was he to say what was normal anymore? 

Mitch ran to the coffee machine, which was everyone else's cue to leave.  Torp and Marie were the last to exit the room, arm in tentacle, and chatting away.  Torp whispered, just loud enough for Benny to hear,

"Did you hear about Overlord Brain 7, and Mitch?"

"I know!  Can you believe it?  He's young enough to be her..."

Benny shook his head as the two lovebats (the last bird went extinct in 2022) slipped out of his office.  The senior editor picked up a loose piece of paper from the table, but just as he lifted it, it slipped carelessly through his fingers, floating downwards.  He sighed in aggravation.  He was old enough to remember when buildings still had floors.

Benny floated up to his feet, allowed his grav-belt to twist and turn him into the proper position, and then slowly glided down through the offices below, being careful to miss the other workers as he descended.  About five floors down he managed to snatch the memo, but by then he was almost at ground level.  Since it was almost lunch, he decided to stop by the Deli on the first floor.  It felt good to rest his feet upon firm ground.

When he stepped in, he noticed that sitting at one of the tables across the room was a thin, blonde, and highly attractive young woman with a purple psuedopod attached to her head.  She was quite beautiful, and young enough to be his daughter.  To Benny's surprise, she began eying him up and down, while smiling at him in a very suggestive manner. 

Benny casually removed a hundred dollar bill from his pocket and then compared the portrait upon it to the young lady across the room. 

The purple psuedopod gave him a wink.

Benny flipped open his communicator, let the office know he was leaving early, and then casually made his way across the room, to see if the stories were true.