Return to Earth, or is it...?

I was returning home from my stint on Big Brother: Naboo. It had been a several long, crazy months and I missed my wife and daughter terribly. Interestingly enough, because of the enigma of space travel, to them it will most likely seem that I just left.

I was entering the Earth’s atmosphere when the Danger Sled began to shudder. I was passing through some strange atmospheric anomaly. My ship shuddered and shook and I spent my time alternating between cursing under my breath and praying that the thing would hold together.

The Danger Sled splashed down in the middle of a pond. I could have sworn by the readings as I was coming in that I got to Chicago, but as I crawled out of the hatch and swam to shore, my surroundings looked completely unfamiliar.

“I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore,” I muttered to myself. I started walking, looking for a road, a fence, a sign. Anything man-made that could lead me to civilization.

I found something, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I found the city, but it looked different. It was a movie theater, but it didn’t look right at all.



Then I turned around, and towering over me was a bull, but he was on two feet!

“Hey!” he yelled. He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him. “A human!”

I’m not sure what happened next, but I remember running and I remember anthropomorphic bulls yelling and chasing me. They ran me down and threw a net over me.

“Get your hooves off me, you damned dirty cows!” I growled.

“He can talk!” several said in hushed awe. Clearly they were as astonished as I was.

They scooped me up and took me to their wisest scientist, Dr. Hoovus. Hoovus was wary of me, but his scientific curiosity demanded that he study me.

“I haven’t met a talking human before,” he said while absently scratching his jaw with his hoof.

“But you have humans here?”

“Yes, we have ranches here full of them,” he answered. “They’re food, or at least they were until the Mad Human disease came along.”

“Disgusting,” I crinkled my nose. “But where I come from, cows are our food.”

“That thought will disgust me until the humans come home,” Hoovus replied with a chuckle. “Hey, do you want to listen to some moosic?”

I bided my time and earned his trust, but when my opportunity to escape presented itself, I took it. I broke free and ran east as hard as I could. I could hear shouting and alarms behind me, but if I kept going they would never catch me. They wouldn’t have, but then I ran across a crumbling building. The crumbling remains one of Chicago’s most well-known structures.

“Oh my God,” I said out loud. “I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was... We finally really did it.”

I collapsed onto the concrete. I pounded my fist onto the ground.

“You maniacs!” I yelled. “You blew it up! Ah, damn you! Damn you all to hell!”

“Um, what are you doing?” Dr. Hoovus was standing over me.

“This is Earth,” I wailed. “I can’t believe we did this. That was the Sears Tower.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied. “Cows built that long ago. Heh, what a mess… such shoddy engineering.”

With that, he drove me back to my ship in his Cattelac so I could fly back home. I know, I could have stretched story out over a couple of days, but I really don’t want to milk this thing.