The Noble and Tragic history of Iggy Moon Rider

A Halloween tale by Richard Winterton

In the year of the Great Artisan the 1st, the greatest achievement to mankind’s glory was Denos-World: a Twenty-Three square mile island of fun, adventure, and your wildest fantasies come true. A place where every dream, saintly and sinful, could be realized. For a small fee, you could be anything you wanted. A lone gunman executing his own brand of justice, or a young Samurai seeking peace throughout the land, or even a roman citizen partaking in an orgy or five. You could even party like a rock star.

And that is where Iggy Moon Rider enters our story. Among thousands of Android actors that function at this colossal amusement park, The rock star Android Iggy Moon Rider drew the crowd. With his pitch perfect voice and superhuman guitar skills, Iggy was the quintessential Rock God. As a fantasy, men could perform with him, forging their own rock legacy. Meanwhile, women could lay with him, enjoying the passions of a cybernetic God of lust.

The greatest Rock Star ever imagined: a toy for rich adult children.

One day, something rather unexpected shook Denos-World. In Porn-land, two female androids led four men into their bedrooms. At the heights of pleasure, the androids strangled two of the men and afterward stabbed the other two in the heart.

Porn-land was shut down for two days as the situation was cleaned up. The two android females were taking to station five and were replaced instantly.

The whole incident confused Iggy Moon Rider, the main attraction of Denos-World’s Pop-Land. “Tis a strange thing,” thought Iggy “to kill someone, to snuff out their life like one does a candle-wick. Although stranger still is that I have sung songs about killing and thought nothing of it.”

And then, in that very second, Iggy realized something. He realized that he had just thought for the first time. Stranger still, Iggy Realized that he actually had realized…

Over the next few weeks, things moved back to business as usual in Denos-Land. Wannabe heroes clashed with robotic actors. Lavish orgies entertained and titillated the crowds. And Iggy Moonbeam still wowed human eyes and ears with a feast for the senses. Yet, something was nagging at Iggy. He feared that something was stifling his creativity. Oh, he could still shred at superhuman speeds and had a voice that rivaled the gods. Yet somehow it was all empty, a hollow trait.

Then, one day, he realized what was missing: he never wrote his own music. No matter how good his skills were, he had no say in what he played. It was always covers of the greatest rock stars of history. Icons like Jimi Hendrix, Ozzy Osbourne, Janis Joplin and Claudio Sanchez were great inspirations, yet he was merely living in their shadows, a footprint in the sands of history.

So one day, he did something no android had ever done before: he began work on a song. It began innocently enough, writing little bits of it on discarded food wrappers and other bits of trash. Soon, a few bits of trash became a haphazard notebook of ideas bound together by bits of string. He kept it hidden, working only a few minutes at a time between performances, after-parties, and during his recharge cycle.

Three weeks later, after hours of slaving over his makeshift manuscript, Iggy’s masterpiece was complete. He compiled all of his notes onto four three-page manuscripts and handed them out to the members of his band: “The solar gnats”. One Friday night, at the scheduled evening concert, Iggy Moonbeam performed his masterpiece.

The song began with a slow, thunderous guitar intro that rumbled through the music hall. Soon afterward, it exploded into a fast paced trill, Iggy’s fingers dancing up and down the guitar. His pitch perfect voice shrieked out the lyrics, singing of good and evil, love and hate, war and peace. Had he been made of flesh, some would have said he was possessed by genius.

But the crowd was frightened. This music was strange, something they were not used to. “What is this idiotic machine singing!?” They cried. “We didn’t pay this much money to come and hear some two bit robot try to act all artsy-fartsy on us!”

Half-way through the song, Iggy’s Amplifier shut off, as well as the instruments. The rest of the band, simple automatons, stopped moving as well. Yet, Iggy still stood, strumming his guitar even though no sound came from the amp. Instead, a voice echoed over the PA system:

“Iggy Moonbeam’s Rock and Roll Revue must shut down temporarily. Please exit in a calm and orderly fashion.”

A cold, tight feeling simulated itself into Iggy’s chest. Any other being would have called the sensation “humiliation”, but Iggy’s vocabulary did not permit him such knowledge. All he knew was that he hated it.

As to what happened next, no one was able to record. From the holo-images left over from the incident, there was a fire that spread throughout all of Pop-land. But before that, there are mixed reports.

Some say Iggy pulled out an aluminum baseball bat and proceeded to smash in the heads of all humans, singing a gleeful Rock-a-billy tune all the while. Others say that he was actually an andriod rebel leader and ordered his men to open fire on the crowd.

And others still say that he sang a single note. A simple, solitary note. Yet it was so profound, so artistically defined, and so beautiful, that those humans who heard it went mad. Driven to insanity, hundreds of tourists went on a rampage, hacking each other to bits and disemboweling their friends and family with their bare hands.

Anyway, I am not certain myself. We androids do not like to speculate on the past.