Artificial Alan was no more a man than I am an asparagus. And yet all who knew him would treat him as a normal human being. Despite the fact that he could not walk, talk, or do anything that ends in ‘alk’, he managed to fit into society remarkably well. He had friends, enemies, lovers… Sometimes they were all the same person. But what made Alan so special was his heart.

During his school days, Alan had bought a real human heart off Ebay and became immensely popular when he used it in a prank against his teacher. He managed to avoid punishment due to the discrimination act and kept the heart as a prop for to use in his newly established life as a ‘class clown’. The heart tricks worked for several months, until a kid came into school with a pair of kidneys he’d bought off Ebay.

Jealous and bitter about losing his role as the organ prankster, he set out to find a new organ to better his rival. When he could not find anything online, Alan decided the only other alternative was to obtain a complete set of organs from his rival.

So the next day in school during maths, Alan stabbed the kidney kid in the chest and began tearing out the boy’s internal organs, exclaiming to the rest of the class what victory he had achieved. It was then that the school realised they had let him go too far and his teacher, Mrs Slagwhore, pulled out the bazooka she had confiscated from a child during an unfortunate show & tell and fired it at Alan.

With classrooms 28 – 32 now destroyed, the kids were dismissed from school early and told not to tell their parents about what had happened. Next day there were continuous news reports on how the rogue vending machine had gone awol and attacked an innocent child for his organs.