The Best Pun

The cream came on the market during a time of fear. “VinceCream™, be your own best friend.” There were rumours that the original development team had formulated the prototype with the goal of permanent transformation, but marketing had watered it down for mass-production. No point in selling a once-off, better to make it temporary and keep the money rolling in. Vince Melling was a God: the fastest, the smartest, the most well-groomed, wives on every continent. Nobody could resist.

The day they brought it out doors were rammed down in every department store across the developed world. China, Japan, South Korea, Great Britain, The European Continent, Australia, North America, Brazil. Also in developing countries: Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, New Zealand. The wave of homogeneity spread out from each source as people rubbed VinceCream™ on themselves and their faces and bodies, even voices, changed to resemble the one true Vince Melling. Everyone's change was different – no one looked exactly the same as Melling or each other after the three hour transformation period, but “the product's effectiveness was assured across all races and body types”, they said, “to within three standard deviations from True Vince.”

Within three months the first customers started coming back after their little plastic tubs started to run dry... the elderly, the infirm, those who needed more VinceCream™ daily to maintain their new state (for the wonder-drug also cured sickness and disability, as Vince Melling, it was widely known, had never been sick in his life). VinceCream Lite™ was a smash hit with twenty-something women. VinceCream Starburst™ with pre-teens. Mothers bought their children VinceCream™ for their third birthday. Sex bars stocked glow in the dark VinceCream™ to use as lubricant in late-night orgies. Vince's sexual prowess was renowned.


The years wore on and VinceCream™ remained the number one selling product of any kind world wide, children were born in hospitals full of look-alike nurses and doctors and parents with smiling faces chiselled from the same stone as their charismatic god. Vince Melling, he walked Earth's every corner, every day, his clones in billions of places, all at the same time. No one could object, and it started to be that even those who had no particular fondness for the man initially had started using his product – social pressures. Don't be left out. Don't be left behind. Racism ended, gender inequality too, and the world was divided into Vinces, and the steadily diminishing ranks of those who continued to hold out. The fringes of society: outlaws, rednecks, idiots, followers of the old religions in the strangest parts of creation where the sun, it was assumed, no longer cared to shine.


Tolerance is not an easy game, and so these corners were slowly wiped out... eventually by force, though never were the hold-outs long in their protest. One week of VinceCream™ can turn anyone, and once the world has been rearranged by a new set of eyes belonging to the immortal himself, like faces in a cloud, it is hard to ever see the chaos again.

*****

Vince Melling sat in his mansion, surrounded by beauties – himself. Walking mirrors, talking and moving in a way almost identical to his own, he spat upon them. They fell directly at his feet.

In the bathroom he locked the door, and drawing his face up close to the mirror and carefully with his hand, trembling with fear and anticipation, he rubbed the VinceCream™ into his own face, then sat silently, waiting for something to happen.

At noon the next day, the world seemed empty. A godless, barren wasteland, filled with living bodies wandering; images of a ghost. Even Vince Melling, because no one is un-Vinceable.