Agent Hulio stepped out of the subway to greet downtown Prague. It was a beautiful September morning. The trees were green with life beneath a pale blue sky. The familiar smell of fried chicken wafted from a nearby KFC.

  Hulio ordered a three-piece meal with chips and a cold can of Pepsi. He derived very little nutrition from the meal on account of the fact that he couldn’t metabolise most of it. His body didn’t recognise most of the produce on the planet as food. However, over the years, he acquired a taste for certain dishes, KFC, stale biscuits, sour milk, mouldy bread and fermented fish.

  After Hulio finished the meal, he ate the cardboard box and wrapping for its actual nutritional content and dropped the empty can of Pepsi and chicken bones into the bin on his way out. He then walked across the road to a convenience store and bought a large bottle of beer and a bottle of bleach.

  He sat on an aged timber seat beneath a small tree, scanned the empty street for onlookers before he poured out the beer from the bottle and refilled it with bleach. He tossed the empty bottle of bleach into a nearby bin, sat back down and proceeded to drink the bleach from the beer bottle, while he smoked a cigarette. The nicotine did little but the carbon monoxide made it easier for the single lung in his skull cavity to absorb nitrogen from the air.

  From appearances, he looked like a hipster in his mid to late 30’s. However, looks can be deceiving. It was some years since he last visited Prague. It was good to be home, globally speaking. Hulio recently arrived back on Earth after completing professional development. The PD consisted of four, three-hour workshops on the ‘Safe application of ambient energy beam weapons disguised as early 21st century firearms’. It transpired in a Federation training facility; a geodesic dome built inside a hollowed-out comet orbiting an old star on the edge of the MACS0647-JD galaxy. At least this time the PD was in this universe.

  The instructor was an odd-looking fellow. They resembled a toadstool five feet in height and covered in a dense mat of bright orange fur. They rested in a metallic purple pot that used two mechanical legs for locomotion. They manipulated their surroundings by extending fronds of fur to grasp objects and operate holographic touch screens.

  Hulio made the workshops interesting by adjusting the universal translator function in his peripheral neural implant to make the instructor sound like an angry Scotsman. Twelve hours of Scottish rants and profanity about ‘primitive monkey handguns’ firing ambient energy beams to stun, kill or vaporise ‘primitive monkeys’ and ‘other threats’ to ‘Primordial Earth, world of origin for the Semi-Aquatic Guinea Pig species’ and also the ‘many members of the Confederacy of Human Posterity’.

  Extraterrestrials, they were all weirdos, thought Hulio.

  Despite 300 years of service to the Primordial Earth Protectorate, he was still finding a hard time grasping the profound weirdness of extraterrestrial life. As for organisms existing beyond three dimensions of space, thanks be to Bloke the Bulldog (treats be upon him) that Hulio’s peripheral nervous system, which also functioned as his central nervous system, was incapable of perceiving the true forms of higher dimensional organisms.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  For Hulio the trip to and from the facility was virtually instantaneous. Unfortunately, during the hyperdimensional jump back to Earth, the Federation skiff encountered dimensional brane disturbance. By the time the skiff jumped out of the bulkverse, six months had passed.

  The Federation pilot was quite pissed. As Hulio disembarked from the cloaked skiff, the pilot complained about missing the birth and childhood of the seventh litter from his 27th mate. Six months of texts boomed across his phone display…

  ‘Karl honey, where are you?’

  ‘Karl, I’m going into labour!’

  ‘Karl, I just gave birth to our 14 offspring! Where the hell are you?’

  ‘You haven’t returned my texts or calls in six months Karl. I’m leaving you for your brother Angus.’

  ‘Go to a Jigoku universe Karl.’

  ‘Nice,’ thought Hulio as the skiff blasted off, passing the Earth’s moon by the time he took his next step, ‘six months of pay including overtime in the bank … time for a holiday.’

  He sent an email to the Earth Protectorate’s head office in Antartica, requesting two weeks’ centenary leave. It was promptly granted. By the end of that day, Hulio was on a plane to Europe. Hence why he was now sitting on a wooden bench in Prague, finishing his bleach in a beer bottle.

  Hulio threw the empty beer bottle into the bin and walked towards the subway station, embarking on a series of trains towards Amsterdam. Unfortunately, he had to change trains at Munich.

  Even after all of these years, Hulio was no fan of Deutschland. During World War 1, while serving as a pilot for the Royal Flying Corps, he was shot down by the infamous von Richthofen. The Germans were intrigued that Hulio refused to die by firing squad, or the 17 other methods of execution that were attempted and failed.

  Fortunately, Hulio managed to escape on the 18th attempt, when he was dragged to a depth of 50 metres behind a U-boat. The shackles around his ankles gave way. It was a long and cold swim back to Britain across the North Atlantic.

  However, things were much worse during World War 2, after he was captured fighting alongside the Russians in Stalingrad. Mundane attempts to execute Hulio quickly attracted the attention of some ethically dodgy Nazi scientists.

  Hulio remembered one of the endless times that he was strapped to a dissection table. A deranged Nazi scientist in a lab coat stained with his blood, walked around the dungeon of a laboratory, reading out loud notes to himself in English with a thick German accent…

  “This man looks like a man,” the scientist noted, “but clearly, it is not a man. The specimen has pink fluorescent blood and lacks a heart. Arteries, veins and capillaries are constructed of what appears to be muscular fibres, able to expand and contract on their own accord, making the need for a heart redundant.

  “The specimen also lacks a brain and yet the nerves throughout the body are quite large and overdeveloped. What functions as a brain is unknown but it is theorised that the nerves are also responsible from processing information? As such much like the circulatory system, the brain may not be a central organ but exists throughout the body. There are three stomachs and a large organ that appears to function as both a kidney and a liver.

  “Spontaneous tissue regeneration has enabled multiple vivisections every day for the last nine weeks. Despite the trauma inflicted upon the being, and indeed we have tried our best to inflict trauma with unbridled flair and creativity, it appears to be impossible to kill.

  “Fire, freezing, drowning, suffocation, crushing, stretching, dropping, acid, poisoning, feeding to the wolves, playing Mozart and Beethoven backwards, decapitation, severing of limbs, chopping off of appendages and all manner of dismemberment yield little effect. Severed body parts rapidly dissolve and evaporate while what is left of the body immediately regenerates.

  “The Führer believes wholeheartedly, that unlocking the secrets of this being will lead to the creation of the übermensch and the inevitable rise of our wondrous Herrenrasse.”

  It was the chopping off of the appendages that Hulio could never forgive or forget. Such acts were below the belt. It was one thing to chop off one but to chop off the whole five? There are some things you just don’t chop off to watch grow back.