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Sleeping
Beauty: a 21C Tale
Once upon a time, the King
and Queen were very sad, because they had no children, and so no heir to
the throne. So the Queen used her money from the public purse to pay for
in vitro fertilisation and eventually a beautiful Princess was born.
There were splendid celebrations. The King and Queen invited the seven
wisest women to the naming ceremony and asked each to bestow on the child
a quality of worth.
Unfortunately, though, they acted in an ageist manner, overlooking the
oldest of these women. She gate-crashed the event and, when the time came
to present the gifts, pronounced that ‘The Princess will prick her finger
with a dirty needle and she will die’.
Everyone was shocked. The Queen had a panic attack. Then most
distinguished women said ‘I cannot prevent this prophecy but I can alter
it. The child will not die but will sleep for a hundred years, and a
handsome prince will awaken her.’ The Queen then commanded that a needle
exchange scheme be organised throughout the land.
The Princess grew older and more beautiful, and began to carry out her
royal duties. One day, visiting a shelter for the homeless she wandered
away from her minders. She came across a pensioner, desperately seeking a
vein. This poor woman was unaware of the Queen’s order and without a final
salary pension could not afford new needles. The Princess knelt down,
massaged the woman’s punctured arm and the well shared needle scratched
her. She fell into a deep coma. There was nothing to be done. The wicked
woman’s prophecy had come true.
The King and Queen begged the wise women for their help. They advised
everyone in the palace to take age defying capsules, apply rejuvenation
masks and sleep in ice caskets. so the Princess would not be startled when
she awoke. With no-one to carry out their royal duties, the palace parks
became infested by genetically modified ivy, and an impenetrable forest
soon encapsulated the royal residence.
A hundred years later, the son of the country’s ruler, decided to use his
gap year to explore the furthest parts of the kingdom. He carried the
essential health and safety equipment decreed by wise women as vital for
journeys to far off lands. Eventually, after trekking across land
decimated by corporate greed he entered the world’s last remaining rain
forest. Beneath the lofty trees of this now unique ecosystem, the ivy clad
palace lay untouched by global warming.
That night, after an organic and fairly traded meal in a sustainable
tourist motel, his local hosts warned him to beware of the indigenous
aliens that inhabited the palace. Their scare tactics made him more
curious. He sought out those who had been through recovered memory
programmes for more details. He learnt about the experiments that had
happened in the palace a century earlier, and that in the excitement
surrounding the eventual discovery of the cure for aging the wise women
had forgotten about their dormant guinea pigs. He was told:
‘They watched them for all those years, and then because their bank
accounts had also been frozen and they had no means of buying their
release, they just left them. As for aliens, no, no, my son, they are all
beautiful people, untouched by greenhouse gases, and the Princess who
sleeps is the most beautiful of them all.’
The Prince was captivated by this story. He lasered his way through the
superweeds that blanketed the palace lawns, scrambled through rooms
crumbling with concrete cancer, and there in the great hall, on a
technologically laden bed, he found a beautiful girl, fast asleep. He
carefully covered her lips with decontamination potions, and started mouth
to mouth resuscitation. The Sleeping Beauty awoke, her breath filled the
palace with warmth and the King and Queen, and their staff emerged from
their ice cocoons.
The Princess focused her eyes on the face above her and her breath grew
faster and faster. The Prince forget all about the compulsory sexual
health promotion course he had attended in nursery school and throughout
that night the essential protection he had been taught to use remained in
his survival kit. Soon, they both had symptoms of the pandemic that had
decimated populations throughout the last century.
Unfortunately, the Prince and Princess were resistant to all the first and
second world viral DNA destroying substances that the wise women had in
their pharmacopoeia. In desperation, they agreed to take the drugs
manufactured for mass consumption and sold at deeply discounted prices to
those in the third worlds. These socially engineered hybrid therapies were
much more effective. The Prince and the Princess, as a token of their
gratitude, left their royal residence and committed themselves to campaign
for the abolition of the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. And, of course, they lived happily ever
after.
©
Marilyn Hammick
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