The light goes out on Zelda as Zope moves to the part of the stage suddenly lit by a red light. Three 5 foot long creatures, which look like cockroaches, approach Zope. They stand up erect when they reach him.

SAF
What are you doing here?

LOW
There’s not supposed to be any humans left on Earth.

ZOPE
I just look human. My body’s an illusion.

BROO

(giggling) Hey fellows, maybe we’re having a hallucination.

LOW
Yeah, maybe we ate too much #6 putrid crap.

BROO
Should have stayed with the #5 diet.

SAF
Nonsense. This is a time traveler.

LOW
Sent by the Great Cockroach in the Sky?

ZOPE
I am Zope. From the planet of Iffin.

LOW
Is that where the Great Cockroach is?

ZOPE
The Great Cockroach doesn’t exist.

BROO
(screeching) Blasphemy!

LOW
(jumping up and down with difficulty) You don’t exist! I’ve read all the holy books! This time is only for the cockroaches!


BROO
You must be a hallucination!

ZOPE
(as Low and Broo shake their bodies angrily but don’t move toward Zope) Sorry to upset you.

SAF
Calm down, Low. Calm down, Broo. Calm down. Let’s find out why the time traveler has come here.

ZOPE
You have strange names. What’s yours?

SAF
My name is Safired.

LOW
But we call him Saf.

SAF
We’ve named ourselves after human polemists of the early 21st Century.

LOW
I’m Low for Lowripee.

BROO
They call me Broo for Brookpee. My parents weren’t sure if I was a boy or a girl when I was born, so they named me after a guy known to be a sissy writer.

ZOPE
A sissy writer? What’s that?

BROO
It’s a writer who is too emotional when he responds to criticism.

ZOPE
So you took names of writers you didn’t admire?

SAF
Actually, none of us read anything they wrote.

LOW
But we’re glad they convinced people to support causes which led to the Nuclear Winter.

BROO
Which put an end to people like you!

SAF
At least on Earth.

LOW
That made it possible for us to evolve.

BROO
To the beautiful creatures we are now. (and she wiggles her behind at Zope)

SAF
Thanks in large part to those writers, we are the masters of this planet.

ZOPE
Doesn’t look like much to be masters of.

BROO
The Nuclear War wiped out just about everything.

LOW
Except for us. It proved we were superior to the humans.

ZOPE
How did it happen?

SAF
Not all at once.

LOW
It started with Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush.

SAF
Two sides of the same coin. Each leader had the wrong interpretation of their religion.

LOW
So they could use their beliefs to justify doing harmful things.

BROO
They thought killing people was okay.

LOW
As long as they were killing people who didn’t have the same beliefs as them.

SAF
Their beliefs allowed them to imagine their enemies were “evil.”

LOW
“Axis of Evil!”

BROO
“The Great Satan!”

ZOPE
But doing hateful things shouldn’t be justified by any religion. That should be ungodly.

SAF
An interesting observation.

BROO
God doesn’t exist! Praise the Great Cockroach in the Sky!

LOW
The extinction of the human race proves their God never existed!

SAF
Humans made God in their own image, isn’t that right, Low?

ZOPE
What about your belief in the Great Cockroach? Isn’t that the same kind of fantasy? (again Low and Broo scream and stomp)

LOW
You’ll be punished for your blasphemy!

BROO
We’ll eat your do-do for dinner!

SAF
Say Broo, take it easy. You’ll have a heart attack.

LOW
Yeah. Why should we get so upset? The humans were the losers. This time traveler is a loser.

BROO
Loser! Loser! You’re just a loser!


SAF
Alright, Broo, enough. (to Zope) We cockroaches like to joke about the human “dinosaurs.” Unlike the earlier dinosaurs who were killed by events beyond their little brains to control, the humans were destroyed because of what their little brains could control.

ZOPE
Good point. (pointing to off stage) What are those lights?

SAF
It’s our shrine to all the humans whose hate for one another made the Nuclear Winter possible.

LOW
We’re so grateful for their religious fanaticism.

SAF
Fundamentalist thinking taken to its logical conclusions.

BROO
We even have songs and dances in their honor.

SAF
Our favorite is “Twisting the Truth Away.”

BROO
The Murky Murdoch remix.

LOW
No. The Cheney and Rice damn everybody version!

SAF
(as the music starts) It’s the Rove and Rush to hell mix!

BROO
(as the cockroaches start their dance to a techno-rap version of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”) Twisting. Twisting. Twisting. Twisting the truth away. What a way. Twisting. Twisting. Twisting the truth away.

LOW
Made my day. A happy day. Twisting the truth away.

ZOPE
Hey, hey, don’t get carried away, guys. I hate to interrupt, but it’s time for me to leave.

SAF
(as they stop dancing and the music is off) But I haven’t told you all the wonderful gory details about how the Nuclear Winter happened. Don’t you want to know our Good News History?

ZOPE
As a time traveler, I’m going back to the early 21st century to make sure things are changed.

LOW
You can’t change what’s happened.

ZOPE
For those for whom the past is the present, the future hasn’t been decided yet. You guys might never exist.

The cockroaches scream as the red light goes out.

Z.N.
(as Zope walks toward her and the cockroaches scamper off stage, the light returns to her) That’s a ridiculous future. It could never happen. I don’t know how you did it, but you tricked me into seeing something … you made me hallucinate somehow.

ZOPE
Zelda, you know something terrible could happen to the human race if we don’t change the way humans treat each other. Creatures, believing they’re so superior, could end up being inferior to the cockroaches. Maybe not like the future I showed you. But something else just as devastating for all of life on Earth could happen if humans don’t change.

Z.N.
I understand what you’re saying, but showing me that future didn’t impress me enough to let your sister take over my body.

ZOPE
Suppose I could show you the guy who shot your Bonnie?

Z.N.
That wasn’t Bonnie. They buried someone who looked like her.

ZOPE
But wouldn’t you like to see the monster who would do such a thing? Then you could see the powers my sister and I have to stop such a tragedy.