THE GROOMDA FILES: Groomda's Deal (pt. 1)

Groomda’s Deal

by Aubrey Lysander

My brother Gelmire has long provided me material. Back when the notion of a career in writing was as distant from my thoughts as Jupiter from Earth (pre Vermont Portal), I would recount Gelmire’s endless social disasters to our cousins via VMail (mail via Vermont Portal). His illustrious career at the Academy gave a personal perspective to the more bureaucratic nuts and bolts journalism I was producing at my first jobs with anti-Vanguard alternative papers like The Black Hole Bugle and Remembering Pluto. I imagine those of you who have been following this spacesubstack for the past few years are surprised I have not once mentioned my little brother in any of my monthly updates. I admit that I had hoped this project would force me to develop material outside my familiar beat. But like a Gremulonian Ambassador to a Gremulonian Spore Infected Terran Womb, I return to my more traditional method of generation. This time, Gelmire is neither the target of my satire nor the object of my critique. He is my source.

I remember the first time Gelmire mentioned Groomda. He had invited me on a SpaceZoom to ask whether or not it was ethical to botox his scar into looking “medically urgent.” I was doing my usual dance of indulging his train of thought so I could harvest the nonsense he, thinking himself in a safe space, was stupid enough to verbalize. In the middle of his defense of “vanity as a weapon”, a scurrying across his screen jostled me out of my deadpan.

“Jesus, Gelmire…do you have a pet slug??”

“First of all, pets are by definition fucking cutie pies so a pet slug is probably illegal. Second, that’s just Groomda. Sometimes one of his tentacles will go exploring. He says it’s just like a normal part of cleaning out the cobwebs of multiple interlocking interconnected intelligence systems, but I think it’s a fucking prison break. If I had to be a part of Groomda, I’d want to escape too.”

“An interconnected intelligence?”

“Yeah, he’s basically a bunch of tentacles that are always fucking. The tentacles speak with one voice so it seems like he’s one person but like, as you literally just saw sometimes they do their own thing. Anyway, vanity is like a gun; you gotta aim it-”

I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about Groomda. What was his deal? My next few spacenewsspaceletters will track my research into this inscrutable, disgusting Cavalier scientist(?).