I didn't dream this up, just dug it out of a Usenet archive a few days ago.

This is the story of the Ultimate Cheerio.

One of the biggest problems facing humanity is world hunger. In a lab somewhere underneath Nebraska, there were these government scientists working on the problem recently. And they came up with the ideal solution: The Ultimate Cheerio. One handful of these things would give all the nutrition an adult human would need for one day. Not only that, but these Ultimate Cheerios reproduced themselves like tribbles, and in any climate from tropic to tundra. Leave an Ultimate Cheerio on the lab bench, and five minutes later you had two. Five minutes after that, you had four. And so on.

You can see the problem.

Pretty soon the lab bench was awash in Ultimate Cheerios. Fortunately the scientists working in the lab that day figured this out pretty quickly. One of them went and fetched a big steel box, and the rest of them scooped up all the Ultimate Cheerios and swept them into the box. They then welded the box shut, labeled the box:

"DANGER - BIOHAZARD - ULTIMATE CHEERIOS - DO NOT OPEN"

and put it in a locked closet, with a couple of Marines standing guard.

Well, sooner or later, as with any conspiracy, the press got wind of the whole thing, and the spin they gave to it was "GOVERNMENT SCIENTISTS CONCEALING SECRET THAT COULD END WORLD HUNGER" and "THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE". So, there was a huge demand for information about the Ultimate Cheerio, which the government steadfastly maintained did not exist.

Then one intrepid reporter got herself into the building where the Ultimate Cheerios were being stored. Somehow she distracted the guards, and you can guess what happened next. The last time a lady opened a box and caused this much trouble, her name was Pandora, and at least that time there was something left in the box. Not this time. She opened the box and whammo, it's Ultimate Cheerios all over the room. Before they knew it, all of Nebraska was awash in Ultimate Cheerios, and there wasn't anything anyone could do to stop it.

Then the Ultimate Cheerio mass started to spread. It spread north and south, and when it got to the South, it ran into kudzu. Now, for those of you who are British or Aussie and not familiar with kudzu, it's a plant that grows in the Southeastern US. Entirely too well. Some lamebrains back during the Depression advocated planting the stuff for erosion control, and like many imported species, it promptly turned into an ecological disaster. It's native to the Far East, but it has no natural enemies in the US, since the insects that feed on it are not native to the US and soil and climate conditions are even more hospitable for it here than conditions back home. The stuff has been known to grow sixty feet in a year. You can literally watch it grow. Insecticides don't kill it.

And it's totally useless. Well, not totally. Some people eat the stuff. It's used in Chinese herbal medicine. And it's useful as animal forage. And people pride themselves on finding new and exotic uses for it. But there's no way it could ever be useful to an extent that mitigates the ecological damage and nuisance it causes the good folk of the South.

So the Ultimate Cheerio ran into kudzu. They got along famously. So famously, in fact, that they swapped some genetic material. Now the Ultimate Cheerio had a ready food source: photosynthesis. The kudzu got something, too: the hardiness it had always wanted, so it could survive a northern winter. What a perfect symbiosis.

Pretty soon the entire Earth was covered in the bastard child of Ultimate Cheerios and kudzu. There was now a Dyson sphere of Ultimate Cheerio Kudzu surrounding the earth. With all sunlight blocked, life on Earth died off.

With all the resources of Earth at its disposal, the Ultimate Cheerio Kudzu mutated yet again. This time, it became like a cell, with an Earth at its core. It divided, and then there were two such cells, stuck together, in orbit around the sun. It underwent mitosis again and again, until it sucked up the entire solar system, with the sun at its core.

Now it had a brand new source of energy: a fusion reactor. The star that was our Sun was now the energy source for a being that threatened to expand even more. And it did, sucking up worlds and stars and laying to waste the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Then it found the "white hole" at the center, a limitless fount of mass and energy. With all that mass and energy, it got even bigger.

You might be wondering by now where this story ends, if the ending is happy, or sad, if it has an ending at all.

Well, the story doesn't have an end.

Because it's a serial.

__

Offered in good fun, no criticism of any writers intended - I'm as guilty of not finishing stories as anyone else here.

Becky