Death by a Thousand Slices

It began with the P’Zone.

The ‘80s were over and the pizza game had grown stale. Round Table was overcharging for greasy slices, Domino’s was a pile of shit and Little Caesar’s was giving away free pies like it was bread and circuses, 24/7. Pizza Hut and its funky pan crust managed to remain in the middle of the pack, but the shareholders were getting antsy and this new-jack, Papa Murphy’s, was starting to pick up steam. Pizza Hut needed a game changer.

They decided that a new pizza architecture was in order; one “designed for that go-go ‘90s lifestyle.” The Board of Executives voted to bring chemists, biologists, physicists, psychologists, mathematicians, engineers and the entire population of a small town in rural Kansas together for a grand experiment, the results of which have never been released to the public. But, there are rumors.

For example, on the first day of the experiment, one of the psychologists asked the CEO if he hadn’t already considered making calzones. The CEO had never heard of a calzone and upon finding out that it was a pizza folded in half with the edge sealed, he had a heart attack and died on the spot. You see, Pizza Hut had just invested a lot of dough in this experiment and this know-it-all psychologist had solved the problem in less time than it takes to deliver a pizza.

The public was left with Pizza Hut’s version of the calzone, the P’Zone, so named in respect of the dying wishes of their now-former CEO. Unfortunately for Pizza Hut, the public’s appetite for a folded over Pizza Hut pizza wasn’t much better than it was for a regular Pizza Hut pizza. The recovery from the death of their CEO and another lukewarm offering was tough, but Pizza Hut still had some tricks up its sleeve.

The experiment in that small Kansas town had never stopped, and Pizza Hut had learned a lot over the years. For their next big offering, Pizza Hut showed the world that it could put cheese in the one cheese-less place on a pizza: the crust. The country’s collective cholesterol skyrocketed. Type II Diabetics couldn’t find their insulin fast enough. Sales of Lactaid went through the roof in a vain effort to contain the cheese overload. Pizza Hut had a hit and the board couldn’t have been happier.

While the public ate cheese-stuffed crust, they unwittingly subjected themselves to the early stages of what Pizza Hut privately referred to as its, “Multi-Integrated Cheese Engineering” (MICE) technology. Cheese-stuffed crust was only the beginning; Pizza Hut had grander designs in mind. The new goal was world domination through pizzafication, and we are finally catching a glimpse of what the MICE tech can do.

Pizza Hut calls it the Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza and it looks like a regular pizza, but it’s surrounded by cheese-filled pockets baked right on to the sides. It’s unclear whether the word “Crazy” in the name implies that the consumer will go crazy eating the pizza or that Pizza Hut is admitting that it is run by lunatics, hell-bent on destroying the world. Neither outcome is very promising and both are probably likely.

Rumors have leaked that Pizza Hut has the technology to alter brain chemistry through the insertion of cheese pockets, but the company isn’t stopping there. Pizza Hut has plans for pizza hats that make you appear taller and more savory and pizza cubes that can be built into, well, pizza huts. Before you know it, we will be living in shanty towns made entirely of pizza where we will be forced into hard labor in factories making pizza AR-15s and stealth pizza bombers for our Pizza Hut overlords and their war machine.

For some of you, living in a pizza world sounds like a dream, but remember the pizza you’re surrounded with will be Pizza Hut’s. Plus, there is no way you will get to pick what job you do. You might luck out and get a cool job like dough-tosser, but what if you end up being the guy or girl who has to kill cats and dogs every day for pepperoni meat? Will you like being paid in lumps of cold Italian sausage, because that is probably what will happen.

If we don’t stop this now, the Kansas experiments may eventually lead to Pizza Hut breathing consciousness into giant pile of pizza who will eventually become an intergalactic gangster and call himself Pizza the Hut. But you don’t have to take it from me; it’s been foretold in the 1987 Mel Brooks classic Spaceballs. We cannot let this happen! We must stop this madness now. All we have to do is refuse to eat Pizza Hut, which is actually pretty easy since it’s not very good anyway. Stay vigilant, America!

-Bocephus Chigger
bocephus@submergemag.com