Chapter Seven

Project Overview: Untitled Document is a serial comedy novel dealing with the sort of topics that we so frequently make fun of here at Something Awful. This Chapter: In the most current and up-to-date outing of Untitled Document we get an insider's look at the daily life of Ukrainian black market porn dealer Popov. Prepare to be amazed by how closely the hatchet-faced smut peddler's world parallels your own! Also in this installment, Dale explains to Cokey why he hates FEMA so much, and boy does that have an awkward conclusion. Plus an exciting and erotic futuristic phone conversation. It's like Dick Tracy's wrist radio only with more lesbians!

The animated husk of Burian Popov Savitskyi was distressingly nude. His torso, arms, and legs were covered with striae where his body had become bloated and distended. Five months ago Popov had been a muscular man with a faint potbelly forming as he transitioned to middle age. Now his stomach was a tightly-packed cannonball of food, crammed full to the absolute limit his internal organs would allow. He sweated and panted from the sheer pressure of it. The weight pressed painfully against his lungs and even his heart, but Popov - the real Burian Popov Savitskyi - experienced it dully as if in a dream.

The real Popov was shoved down deep inside his skull like a garbage can full of trash being compressed by an enormous boot. He no longer controlled his bodily functions. He could dimly perceive his five senses as they focused and tuned without his guidance. Had this Popov been given access to the full capacity of his brain he would have felt unmitigated rage at what had become of him. Instead he experienced it all with detachment. He was nothing more than a ghost inside his own body, or more appropriately, a rapidly fading memory.

A new order had come to the lands of Burian Popov Savitskyi, a totalitarian regime bent on eating and fucking. This Popov was an interloper; an alien force that had entered Popov while he was sleeping five months earlier and forced the yoke from pilot. The longer this alien remained in control of Popov's body the closer the real Popov came to ceasing to exist entirely.

Popov's frequent partner in crime was the tall, lanky, and awkwardly bird-faced Vladimir Andropov. He was a rich brat grown into a monster. He had dropped out of college in Moscow to film illegal pornography and commit murder with the hulking muscular Ukrainian Popov many years earlier. Vladimir was normally quiet with calculating dark eyes and a fidgety demeanor that only added to the image of him as a perpetually preening bird. Vladimir and his body had parted paths in the same way and on the same night that Popov had been robbed of control. In the past five months Vladimir had sprouted a pregnancy-like belly to match his comrade's, although his body's metabolism had not turned him into the all-encompassing fat man like Popov.

Since the takeover the pair had begun living together in Popov's ramshackle Brooklyn apartment. They only separated when taking turns walking to the nearby 7-11 to stock up on food or if one of them had a deal to carry out. They spent the rest of their time gorging on candy and watching videotapes of people screwing.

For those who had known Popov in his life before the change the man had not come out altogether worse because of what had happened. He was as stone-silent as ever, but now his brutal rage and capacity for sudden violence had been completely diminished. Physically he was a wreck; the weight, the scabs covering his fingers, the rashes that had sprouted on his backside, and many other signs of neglect. His hygiene had deteriorated dramatically as well. The force controlling him was either not prepared for or not interested in keeping him very clean. Popov only ever showered before the meetings he was forced to conduct and this he did as rapidly and ineffectively as can be imagined.

It was late morning and it was very hot. The cracked paper shades were pulled on all the windows and still the light outside seemed hateful to the sensitive eyes within eyes. The creatures that inhabited Popov and his companion were intensely photosensitive and hated direct sunlight even though it could do them no harm within their human shells. They were part of a race of creatures, amorphous and indistinct, that had evolved in the unlikely cauldron of a gas giant seven million trillion miles distant from earth. Once proud, this race had fallen eons before most others had even evolved the ability to walk or crawl. Factions within the planet-sized atmospheric storms of Numinus VIII had fought several vast and terrible civil wars and decimated the population of floating purple creatures.

The survivors had fled in many different directions, casting through the cold void in silent and nearly invisible ships forged of argon, oxygen, and hydrogen. They developed a deserved reputation as all around bastards among other species as they coasted in to more primitive cultures and inhabited the dense and fleshy bodies they found. When the Imperatrixians rose to prominence the Numinians were ruthlessly hunted and exterminated for the threat they posed to all other species. A few, like the two inhabiting a Russian and Ukrainian in Brooklyn, managed to find sanctuary within the folds of various rogue factions. They were still mistrusted - after all how can you really trust someone who can take over your body on a whim - but with the help of underworld figures like Linus Guthry arrangements could be made.