(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/12/09/last-call-for-fomalhaut/)

Did the ancient Texans practice cannibalism? The jury’s out on the matter. It’s possible they gorged on animals rather than human flesh. Data fracking in the Huntsville Shale encountered coprolites of an extinct bovine species — possibly a food source.

Those same sediments yielded human residues showing signs of poisoning. Some anthropologists posit a cult of human sacrifice; others theorize miscreants may have been executed with the poison. In one of history’s many happy twists, analysis of the toxic residues by Isthmian paleontologists furnished a crude chemical blueprint for the marvel that became Texas cologne. The unlikely legacy of a backward culture that burned and bartered carbon syrups near a nameless gulf eons ago jumpstarted the Isthmian toxicology industry, backbone of the duchy’s economy.

I hear you whispering, “What became of Siddhartha Huff?” As we know, Sidd threw his expendable dupe Claw Hammer under the bus. Sidd thus narrowly escaped detection for his ruse to hack Fort Zuckerberg during the Lunation Gala to nick non-fungible hormone tokens for his transition. Chastened and demoralized, Sidd resigned himself to a Rhipidistian decadence frittered away in gilded squalor and frolicky doldrums on sterile rivieras aboard morally vacant yachts.

The best laid plans can come a cropper, however. An uprising led by the ascendant Beni Hammer clobbered the autocracy, upending Sidd’s future such as it was, and rendering Isthmia as we know it unknowable.

~ THE END ~

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved