This was a gchat sent to someone who wasn’t even logged on.
me: cosbonauts
2:01 AM
did you know that the Russians spent nearly $10 billion researching a top-secret Cosbonaut program?
this was the 80s
the Soviet Cosbonaut’s mission was to plumb the cosb energies to find a more powerful Soviet Cosby
dubbed Cosbnik, the Worker Cosby
2:03 AM
The early Cosbnik experiments were an unmitigated disaster.
2:06 AM
Alexey Paviliznov, a bright young Starshina in the Red Army, was conscripted as the first participant in the top secret experiment.
2:08 AM
Interestingly, the Cosbonautics experiments began before the ascension of the Western, capitalist Cosby in the mid-1980s. By then, of course, Andropov had predicted the failure of the Cosbonautics program, and its retirement in 1990 is considered one of Gorbachev’s finest achievements.
2:09 AM
The proliferation of rogue Cosbonautics laboratories in the post-Soviet Balkans was far in the future, and Brezhnev’s idealism fueled the education of the first Cosbonautics experts, dubbed “Cosbonchiks” by the Party cadre.
2:11 AM
By 1980, Brezhnev had committed Soviet forces to the clearly misguided act of hubris that was the Afghan War.
2:13 AM
Already desperate, yet inflated by his own hollow efforts at the development of a personality cult (the Cosbonchiks were a significant voice in the posthumous revocation of Brezhnev’s Order of Victory medal), Brezhnev turned again to that most hoary of Cold War chestnuts: the development of a Superman.
2:17 AM
Meanwhile, in the so-called “Free World”, William H. Kraemer, a physicist born and raised in the Jewish enclave near South Street in Philadelphia, had experienced a dramatic and catastrophic breakthrough in his research.
2:20 AM
Kraemer had toiled in obscurity at a series of experimental facilities during the late 1960s and 1970s following the awarding of his doctorate from Harvard in 1968.
2:22 AM
The times were different. In the postwar era, for a young Jew from South Philadelphia, a career as a nuclear physicist had become something of a glamorous mikvah – a path to fame and power as well as something bordering on a secular priesthood.
2:25 AM
Kraemer, raised on equal portions of Torah study and the rebellious sounds of Black Philadelphia soul despite his immigrant father’s attempts to steer the boy int he right direction, brought a curious mix of brilliance and apparent lethargy to the table.
2:27 AM
His supervisors and academic superiors often complained about his lack of motivation, particularly during the dark days of Vietnam that had cast a shadow up
on American nuclear and military ambitions. Yet, he maintained steady employment among the particle accelerators and spinning gyros of the nuclear physics laboratories in the Mojave.
2:28 AM
Unbeknownst to his superiors, however, Kraemer was indeed working hard at a problem that had plagued him since its appearance in 1970.
2:30 AM
A scant year after his first appointment as a postdoctoral fellow with the Atomic Energy Commission, Kraemer discovered a conundrum that would drive him to a bizarre future as America’s leading Black entertainer and its most effective bulwark against Soviet aggression since the Berlin Blockade
2:31 AM
In a routine particle accelerator test – using practice particles accumulated from dust bunnies – Kraemer experienced a sudden surge of energy that lasted for a full five seconds.
2:32 AM
Kraemer instinctively realized that this was no mere accident of light. Quietly, after his colleagues had left for the day, Kraemer sat down at his old graduate school drawing board and began to sketch furiously.
A month later, Kramer wrote the following words in his diary:
2:33 AM
“I have seen the face of God. The half-truths and deceptions behind what I have known thus far have been ripped away, and in the naked light I am blind.”
This, as historians have exhaustively chronicled, was when the cosb particle matrix was discovered.
2:34 AM
Oddly, Kraemer kept his discovery a secret.
2:35 AM
Some have speculated that it was his secret relationship with the department head’s wife, one Mrs.Cordelia Bloomfield-Jones, that led to his hesitation.
2:36 AM
Others believe the cosb particle had already began to transform Kraemer, that the molecular pathways in his mind and body had already begun reconnecting and growing.
2:39 AM
Regardless of the reason, the facts speak for themselves. The cosb particle was discovered in 1970, by Dr. W. H. Kraemer. In 1980, Kraemer was long gone, but a youthful Black comedian calling himself “Bill Cosby” was making the rounds on the American talk show circuit.
2:40 AM
His mysterious appearance in South Philadelphia on the same day, time, and street Dr. Kraemer had disappeared in 1976 was never commented upon. Cosby’s initial work was certainly praised, but eclipsed in popularity by the more raw Richard Pryor.
2:41 AM
The development of Pryonite was also unknown to the American public, and would not be revealed until the Clinton administration’s purge of the Afro-nuclear comedic physics program in 1997.
2:44 AM
Regardless, “Bill Cosby” spent the majority of his time working East Coast comedy clubs and absorbing fractions of cosb energy from every naturally-occurring cosb particle exchange matrix from Baltimore to Boston.
In 1980, Brezhnev sat despondent in front of his television, watching a pristine pirate signal of American television, courtesy of the KGB.
2:45 AM
Brezhnev hated American television commercials, but this one caught his eye.
2:46 AM
It was a close-up shot of Cosby, hawking the latest gelatinized pudding snack to the clueless capitalist masses.
2:47 AM
In Brezhnev’s only moment of brilliance, he noticed the strange ways in which Cosby behaved and the apparent total disregard paid these mannerisms by the American pop cultural establishment.
Brezhnev sent his prized lieutenants on a fact-finding mission, and within six months the Cosbonautics program was created.
2:48 AM
Brezhnev was convinced that the development of a faster, stronger, more explosive Soviet Cosby would be the deciding weight that would tip the scales in favor of the rapidly decaying Soviet imperial ambition.
Worker Cosby would be ten times the Cosby of the United States and a thousand times more cosbonic.
2:50 AM
Cosb energy was scarce in barren Russia, however, and it was unheard of in the United States such that no amount of spying or intrigue would unearth its source.
Bill Cosby himself had not yet revealed his secret, nor has he done so publicly to date.
2:51 AM
Kraemer’s work was confined to personal, private diaries, later discovered in a 2005 raid on Cosby’s fortress-like facility in Antarctica.
2:52 AM
Cosby reportedly laughed when watching footage of the raid, saying, “I am in all places at once and I am the alpha and the omega. Coooooo gooooooo ca chee chee chizzoooo!”
2:53 AM
In any case, Cosby’s power was still something of a secret in 1980, and Brezhnev’s Cosbonic Organizational Science Bureau, or “COSB”, embarked on a series of gruesome human experiments to achieve what Kraemer had apparently achieved with no intentional effort on his part.
2:54 AM
Starshina Paviliznov was an early casualty. The son of poor farmers from Uzbekistan, Paviliznov was barely aware of what was going to happen to him, nor could anyone expect him to have been so.
2:55 AM
His remains were discreetly burned, the residual cosb energy harvested for future experiments.
A series of clone Cosbniks were finally produced in 1984, each crude and barely functional but able to harness some aspect of the cosb particle matrix and its attendant energies.
2:56 AM
The joy would be short-lived.
2:57 AM
On September 20, 1984, Bill Cosby unleashed his coup de grace against the American public. The “Cosby Show”, a propaganda vehicle of heretofore unheard of proportions, clawed and stabbed at the public eye like a cobra from hell.
2:58 AM
On his part, Cosby was at the top of his game. The Cosby Show represented the apex of Kraemer’s feverish dream. From his bully pulpit, Cosby would project cosb energy in concentrated form to the “hot spots” of the Cold War.
3:00 AM
It is rumored that, under direct commands from President George H. W. Bush, Cosby lanced the Berlin Wall from space in 1989 and effectively destroyed it.
3:02 AM
Cosby’s ability to project power from multiple locations was formidable, and his capacity to destroy made Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like minor footnotes in the history of cosbonic explosiveness – for, of course, the cosb particle was at the core of nuclear fission as well.
3:04 AM
The Worker Cosbies – the Cosbniki – became ubiquitous in the halls of the Kremlin after the 1984 American Cosby coup. While a scientific failure, they became the regime’s most trustworthy and effective secret police and bodyguards. Their skills honed in the gladiator academies of the gulags, the Cosbniki were feared by anyone who knew of their existence.
3:06 AM
A Cosbnik refugee, Cosbnik 938A, reported in 2001 that his years spent in hiding in the Caucasus Mountains and the jungles of Cambodia were solely out of fear of his Cosbnik brothers in Moscow. No other military force – saved Cosby himself – could have apprehended him.
3:09 AM
While the declassified documentation recounting the halcyon days of the American Cosby offensives and the parallel Soviet Cosbonautics machinations, organized mostly by COSB, remain shocking, the consequent proliferation of illicit Cosbniki smuggled across borders and warzones beginning in the mid-1990s is perhaps more terrifying and relevant to the contemporary political milieu.
That, however, is a story for another day.
Good night.