“Watch your step,” the learning tech warned. “You’re standing in a puddle of molten mozzarella cheese and the next thing you know you’re up to your knees in ice cream.”
“If this is the extent of the danger,” I said, almost tripping over a sixteen-foot-long gummi worm encrusted with 10-carat sugar crystals, “then why are there armed guards present? Those didn’t look like tranquilizer guns.”
“The children aren’t targets,” he held up his hands, “They were sedated as soon as we realized the source of the incursion. The weapons are for use against the six-foot tall anthropomorphic mice and ducks. It wasn’t just food that they were fantasizing about.”
“So, after they’ve been put to sleep, the fruits of their imaginations remain?” I said as we approached a life-sized Hot Wheels car. Its doors didn’t open, it’s steering wheel didn’t turn and it was upholstered in molded plastic. Smooth hard tires were stuck in the pizza cheese as bright metal-flaked paint sparkled in the sun.
“We thought this new iteration of the learning serum would help to better affix knowledge and skills in the memory. We thought that memory was resident in the human brain. We had no idea that it would allow our test subjects to manifest objects from their imaginations into the real world.”
“How old were the subjects who received the new learning serum derivative?” I asked.
“Between the ages of four and eight.”
“How long will they remain under its effects?”
“This is the first time that the new serum has been live tested, but it’s usually about six to eight hours. That’s when they’ll lose the ability to create more of these things…” he swept his arm around the schoolyard that was festooned with giant-sized toys, junk-food and candy. “As far as how long this stuff will remain? We really don’t know.”
A highly pressurized popping sound rang out behind us as we approached a pile of Skittles the size of Frisbees. A dark figure slid to our feet among an avalanche of yellow, orange and green. At the base of a pair of round black ears, a dot about the size of a nickel oozed thick red fluid towards the ludicrously-proportioned eyes that stared lifelessly beneath it.
“Was that really necessary?” I asked. “I mean, it’s Mickey Mouse. What harm could he have possibly done?” The learning tech shook his head sadly and extracted a stylus from his breast pocket. He inserted the tip under the gigantic rodent’s top lip and pulled upwards. A row of needle-like teeth were revealed, with spots of blood and tatters of green cloth sticking out between them in places.
“That’s all that’s left of the custodian,” the learning tech said grimly. “According to the principal, Mickey saw the rat poison and traps and went ballistic on the guy, screaming something about genocide in that high-pitched voice of his. Donald must not be allowed to reach the Chinese restaurant next door. It would be a blood bath.”
Literature in Small Doses 