By
Ray Blank
A parody of the Hugo-Nominated, Nebula-winning “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”
If you were a hamburger, my love, then you would be lightly grilled. You were sanguine during the great E. coli pandemic of 2046, and your dread of Martian flu meant you never lingered at barbecues, back when people still ate outdoors. You’d be a meaty burger, a real whopper, an eight-hundred-pounder, reflecting the ample human girth made possible by living in our low-gravity environment. Thick rich ketchup would ooze across your skin, not evaporating into a toxic mist, like it did when we crosslinked the matter transporter to the microwave oven and tried to feed people mid-beam. Most of all, if you were a hamburger, you would be rare.
If you were a lightly grilled beef patty, then I would become a waitress, so I could serve you. I’d butter your buns, like in the old days before runaway nanites made milk products sentient. I’d lay you on a bed of lettuce and tomato, and cover you in processed cheese. They say the thought waves emanating from modern dairy and vegetables can scramble the psychic senses of police clairvoyants, thus preserving us from incarceration if we violate sexcrime statute S84.
If we violated sexcrime statute S84, and got away with it, then I would sing to you afterward, especially show tunes from Hello, Dolly! and other decadent bourgeois relics of the postmodernist precivilization. You wouldn’t sing back, because it’s absurd to suggest a hamburger might sing, though they can sizzle from time to time. However, a neural link to my smartphone would allow you to play those ringtones that most closely correspond to whatever music floats through your burger mind.
If you were playing a ringtone on my smartphone, it would probably sound like the song you’re playing me now. Beep. Beep. Beep. The tone of your life support machine is bittersweet. You’re more machine than human, but that’s not much of a change; we’re both 178 years old, and joining the Cyborg Union was cheaper than health insurance. My heart beats with yours. They should—they’re both running the same software, and it’s synched to Greenwich time via a satellite uplink. But when they removed your chrome and plastic outer casing, I gazed upon your organic vestiges and thought fondly of traditional foodstuffs rarely seen outside of a holographic library.
If we visited a holographic library together, then I would use my cyborg shapeshifting skills to assume the form of a giant onion ring, so you wouldn’t appear quite so weird to all the kids who run around and mash the buttons on the interactive displays instead of learning anything. People would weep at the memory of slicing onions, and impressed by the spectacle of seeing us together, the librarians in the genetic department would clone a real pig just so they could top you with genuine bacon.
If you were joined in secular matrimony with a slice of bacon, I’d try not to be jealous of you preferring a bit of piggy-in-the-middle to playing with my ring. I’d be sad, and crying, and wailing loudly, and wearing the white dress I bought for our wedding, but I wouldn’t do any of that to make you feel uncomfortable. On the contrary, I’d really really want you to marry a sliver of processed pork if you’re sure that’s what you wanted. It just happens to be the case that white shows off my complexion, and the color would help to hide any stains if you drip mayonnaise on me. So marry the bacon, if you must, but don’t come crying to me if the resurrected heads of 17th century statesmen currently serving on the Supreme Court decide to interpret Clutterbuck v. Homogenate Margarine Substitute as justification for rescinding the universal human right to divorce.
If I was wearing white at your wedding, I’d also want to wear something old, new, borrowed and blue, even though I wouldn’t be the bride and that’s what brides wore until our Artificially Intelligent overlords banned all forms of neopagan ritual, especially those which assigned different roles according to gender. To keep things simple, I’d borrow some stinky old blue cheese and incorporate it into a new hamburger recipe, and then wear that as a hat. The smell of my daring fashion statement would make it obvious you’re no longer the only hamburger in the world, which should make you smile, instead of complaining that I’m embarrassing you in public like usual.
If you weren’t the only hamburger in the world, or a cyborg which is almost fifty percent organic, then maybe you would have successfully fought off those ex-military androids who returned from the failed mission to conquer Io. Being homeless and intelligent synthetic lifeforms, they were entitled to fight you for your living quarters, even though you bought that apartment with money you borrowed from your parents. I had some sympathy for your plight, but democratic decentralization inevitably means rioting should be protected as an exercise of free speech. I watched helplessly whilst they kicked you in the taco, and pounded your brain into sweet and sour sauce. Sadly, the androids were careful not to mix their regrettable but perfectly legal ultraviolence with a prohibited activity like badwordscrime. They gave me no excuse to call the thought police. Though you were very angry at the time, you must admit the androids were pretty ingenious, using comically outdated phrases to deprecate you whilst they viciously pounded your skull. They called you a malcontent, and a vagabond, and a rogue, and a rotter, and a cad, and a bounder, and a ne’er-do-well. When one of them called you a eunuch jelly, I lifted my phone, thinking that might be badwordscrime, but the smartphone AI corrected me, saying “eunuch” was a legitimate reference to a recognized gender reassignment.
If you were a hamburger, my love, you’d be a great big fatty burger covered in cheese and bacon and pickles and relish, and then your enemies would eat you, and then they’d suffer heart disease, and possibly flatulence too. It’s fair to assume the androids would eat you. They don’t really need food but they like to appear like ordinary people, and I know I’d want to eat you, but only if I didn’t know you already. Or maybe eating you would rust the androids’ innards, though it’s possible the grease might actually be good for them. Anyhow, let’s suppose the androids started dying from heart disease because they couldn’t afford health insurance either. How I’d laugh at that! Whilst they were lying in their hospital/autoshop beds, I’d slink up to them using my shapeshifting skills, and show them a live update of their credit rating, which would demonstrate their medical bills had doomed their robotic offspring to a lifetime of indentured servitude.
If I laughed at ruining the credit rating of the androids’ children, then eventually I’d feel a little bit guilty, because you shouldn’t punish the daughterboard for the sins of the motherboard. But I’d only feel guilty to make it clear how superior I am to an android, because they lack a full range of emotions as appropriate for every situation. And then I’d laugh a bit more, because I really am superior. Ha!
If you were a hamburger, my love, then I’d be happy because that would mean cows aren’t extinct, and the closest analogue to beef would no longer be cockroach pâté. But cows are extinct, thanks to the cull which saved us all from methane overload. So it’s with a heavy heart that I give permission to recycle you into Soylent Green, because you’ll never be a hamburger, though you’re dead meat now.