Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

The Dangers of Opening Twix

Until now, only ten important people were aware of their existence. The Tupperware people knew of similar creatures for sealed pies and pastries, but they recognized that the specific conditions beneath the seal, combined with certain sugary textures, created the necessary living variables, much as carbon does for the silly homo sapien race. But since Tupperware does not in fact mass-produce the contents within, their legal team has a clear defensible position which places them in the clear for endangering lives. They escape culpability.

Twix, on the other hand, does create conditional material -- specifically, gooey candy bars within sealed packages that allow life to evolve. Thousands of tiny environments, in fact. Sets of two. And until now, the horrible secret has remained tightly kept.

The men inside spin spanned steel twixt twain chocolate sticks. Micromen clanging miniscule hammers, breaking tiny flakes of chocolate for plinth, suspension, so long as the package is unopened. They live happy lives. The chasm beneath these nimble worker bees is a giant reservoir of air, the silt bottom reflecting the shimmering sky of plastic protecting them from the elements. This small working class microcosm hopes that ants and other assorted insects will not use their mandibles and destroy the plastic seal of their happy little gated community.

There are many of these candy bars circulating throughout the world, finding their way into stores and eventually into the hands of consumers, sometimes opened immediately and, other times, opened after being momentarily put into a freezer, where the workers within the candy bar housing shiver and freeze, often dying cold and painful deaths.

But this tragic hypothermia pales in comparison to the micromen's vampire-like evaporation when exposed to light. When a customer rips open a package, the light instanteneously destroys not only the wondrous bridges, homemade bowers and glorious chocolate Quonset huts that these beatific micromen construct, but also the very micromen themselves. The only trace of their existence is the ridge, which forms as the microman stands happily on chocolate terrain, only to disintegrate into nothingness, his footprints the only remainder. While most people believe that the machines create those glorious ridges, found on the topmost texture of all Twix bars, it is actually the small, barely perceptible conflagrations of a suddenly opened package which cause this tiny subtlety.

Despite the presence of an expiration date signaling the time that the community will transmute into moldy, melty or otherwise unedible form, the process of opening a Twix bar, which thousands of people enact every day, is, in short, genocide. Millions of micromen are destroyed on a daily basis. On a tiny, basic level, the sudden tear of a candy bar package has produced a veritable Rwanda 365 times a year.

I ask those who would dare open a candy bar how they can sleep a night. How can they willingly disregard this tiny life form, who has done nothing save construct bridges of chocolate? And where, pray tell, are the archeologists and zoologists? Why does the mysterious life of the Twix Microman remain a secret?

I have much more to say about these and other ethical questions at a later time. But for the moment, the immediate solution is to get the candy-eating public to stop eating, let alone opening Twix bars. Respect these small creatures. They have the potential to be your friends.

Posted by DrMabuse at May 24, 2004 02:18 PM