The Man with the Giggling Nose

It happened that there was a man in the process of walking to his place of work. Nothing unexpected happened, and he arrived as usual, spent a good many hours working, and then prepared to leave for home.

And home he went. But on his way, a stranger approached him; this stranger said something wholly unexpected: "It is hereby made known that your nose shall come to giggle in accordance with the prophecy."

The man, thinking little of this, simply walked on. But by the time he arrived at his door, his nose began, gradually at first, to twitch constantly. And the time would turn out to be short before he would begin to hear a sound, the never-ceasing sound of giggling.

Finding his nose persistent in its unusual activity, he soon began to accept this new situation, becoming determined to learn all that he could about it. He easily found the time needed to acquaint himself with the basics. For a start, he spent the night thinking about this new reality of his life, as the sound of the giggling nose kept him awake.

Morning eventually came, and the man went once again to work after his breakfast. His boss had a new task for him and proceeded to discuss it, all the while becoming increasingly aware of the strange sound that emanated from the nose of his employee. The boss was most perplexed, and became increasingly nervous as he began to doubt his own sanity; soon, he decided to schedule an appointment for an examination at the local mental hospital, frightful thoughts racing through his mind.

While the man went home that day, his boss went in for a rigorous psychiatric evaluation, and at the end of it he was prescribed a variety of pharmacological substances, which he went to procure at once; having taken them, the side effects were quick to manifest, and he began to hallucinate in earnest. Thus his fate was sealed, and he was to spend the rest of his life locked up in a mental institution.

Meanwhile, the man, in going about his daily business, had just made a new aquaintance; someone who, having quickly noted the activity of the man's nose, was eager to converse; for this new acquaintance, it turned out, had begun to study the issue in earnest, after encountering other cases.

The two of them, both having open minds and a thirst for knowledge, soon came to work together, and what they discovered in their research would come to be of great significance for all of mankind.

They saw that this phenomenon, which was increasing in its spread and scope, implied the beginning of a change in the basic conditions of human existence, and events on a cosmic scale.

Several years passed, and eventually it came to be that the greater part of humanity had acquired noses that giggled; despite efforts on an ever-increasing scale to spread knowledge of what was to come, this came as a shock to many who were unprepared, with chaos resulting.

Much would happen among those least prepared, among whom were many mental health professionals; unable to accept the new reality of the existence they found themselves in, they promptly declared themselves psychotic, and finding that there were none left to take care of them, they soon sank into a helplessness which descended into catatonia; and were it not for a number of former patients more accepting of reality, they would have starved to death, for these patients now took over the asylums and, in a great display of humanity, took care of their former caretakers.

Events soon proceeded of which many were of an even stranger nature, but thanks to the increasing spreading of awareness throughout the world, humanity was to turn out capable of facing what ultimately confronted it.

Epilogue

As ages came, were lived, and passed, many stories of the past were made and remade; one of these, illustrating the human mindset at the time when the great challenges of the past began, ultimately came to be as follows...

Two persons met, and the first began to talk. The second elongated throughout the talk, and by the time it had finished he was twice as tall as the first person.

"How ordinary," said the first person upon noticing this, "nothing unexpected".

"Toodles!", said the second person, and disappeared.

"Such is the boring drudgery of everyday life", remarked the first person, and began to walk away.

When the first person had walked away, a third voice erupted: "Poodles!"

And so it was.