Originally written on 2/12/2011; rewritten and reposted 9/10/2017
Joel hadn’t had a good idea in some time. His blood-seeking wasps were rejected by the military. His cabbage-fueled car got excellent mileage but the odor of farts inside the car was overwhelming. His proposal for a three-legged horse, which he pointed out, would offer improved stability, never got past the planning stage. He was in a slump, and although his co-workers told him not to worry, Joel feared that his job was at risk.
On the subway home, Joel was knitting his brow, worrying about his future. He absentmindedly peeled an orange; the firm peel bursting with oil and ripping loudly as he pulled it from the juicy flesh. As he started to split the wedges, an old lady across the aisle dropped her coin purse. In a happy act of kindness, passengers knelt to help her gather the coins. Joel watched the many hands passing coins to the woman who gratefully held her coin purse open to the crowd. He saw how her skin was thin like velum, scattered with liver spots, ropy veins standing out like earthworms. The skin on the hands pumping coins into her purse looked firm in contrast; plump with life and vitality. He especially noticed the hands of a college student, fumbling with her IPod as she slipped coins to the old woman. Her skin was unblemished, like the wood of a freshly peeled stem; perfect and smooth and vibrant. He noticed the orange peel in his own hand, and knew he was on to something.
The key to Joel’s success was understanding that the pith of the orange skin was chemically similar to the stuff that gives young skin its vibrancy; collagen. His patented technique for genetically extracting and recombining orange peel with human skin would make his company bigger than oil and banking combined.
RePeeled Salons became as common as McDonalds. Anyone who had taken the recombinant DNA injections could painlessly remove their old skin to reveal a firm, fresh, wrinkle-free one beneath. Joel’s genius was to design a pill that would trigger the sloughing of the old skin. The pill was only available in the Salons, where trained staff would help you peel away your old skin and protect the new one until it became firm enough for use. Humans became like crabs, hiding in dark corners on spa beds, waiting for their shells to harden.
It became impossible to tell how old anyone was, except by the rasp of their voice or the wateriness of their eyes. The obituary page was filled with photos of what looked like teenagers who had served in distant wars and were survived by great, great grandchildren.
One day, a rumor made the rounds that RePeeled’s main competitor had developed a method to literally melt away fat. If true, it would mean the end to obesity, and would significantly cut into RePeeled’s market share, plus give them a product even the young would want. Panic struck Joel’s department, as they tried to develop a fat-melting injection and get it to market before anyone else. Joel once again turned to food for inspiration. He noticed how the fatty part of bacon melted away as it cooked, leaving behind mostly intact meat, or muscle. He reasoned that if he could lower the melting point of human adipose tissue, or fat, it would simply drain away. After months of work he at last extracted a gene from coco butter and spliced it into the fatty tissue of pigs. After the injections, the pigs became svelte. The fat left as greasy excrement, but took only a week to pass. The marketing department did not see this as a problem.
Under pressure from the CEO, Joel released his findings and RePeeled started injecting test clients in select markets around the world with the miracle fat melting formula. It worked like as promised, and RePeeled was saved. The company geared up for worldwide distribution, running factories around the globe day and night to manufacture fat melting elixir as quickly as possible.
Obese people around the globe brought folding chairs and waited at the RePeeled Salons for weeks until for the much promoted day the injections would be available to all. Sweating, breathing heavily through their whistling noses, fat people around the world eagerly took the injection.
Reports of the first deaths lit up the Internet the next evening. Not only was the fat of people around the world literally melting away, so too was their collagen. All too quickly people were dropping into piles on the floor like entrails in a slaughterhouse. The injections were not only melting all the fat, all the connective tissue melted as well. The dead became no more than a loose pile of bones and organs floating inside in a skin bag.
It was later revealed that the problem lay in a mis-translation of the formula from English to Chinese, where the majority of RePeeled’s factories were located.
RePeeled limped along for a few years, but the public was now jittery, and they only remain as a subsidiary of Amway. Joel retired early, and continues to pursue his research on the three-legged horse.