By Simon Petrie

Thanks to the 2040 raw milk amnesia pandemic, many people have already forgotten what it was like to live through that mercifully brief stretch in the mid-2030s when the Extra Head movement was at its zenith.

It had started, as do so many retrospectively ill-judged fads, with the billionaire class: active-volcano lair construction had become passé, gold-plated private jets had lost their shine, the surreptitious drone-bombing of each other’s superyachts with orca sex pheromones was no longer the thrill ride it had been, so what more logical next step could there have been, in the ever-present techbroligarch arms race to seize notoriety, attention and adulation? The double-headed megarich began to crop up like so many twin-cap mushrooms.

As transplant costs fell, televangelists, upwardly mobile pentesters, YouTube influencers spruiking their grandmothers’ secret recipes for biblically accurate angel food cakes, well-heeled hair-metal guitarists and try-hard Zaphod Beeblebrox impersonators all got in on the act. 

Some even took it further. The acclaimed Mixed Martial Archery contestant and incelebrity Andrew Moma-Guggenheim famously had himself equipped with three heads, each with a field of view 120 degrees apart from the other two. Moma-Guggenheim declared that, with this wraparound vision, he was [sic] ‘imperious to ambush attacks’. He went on to win two full seasons of the controversial but popular livestreamed deathmatch sport before being tragically killed by a falling piano. 

Other proponents of bicapitalism met less exquisitely choreographed ends, often as a consequence of transplant rejection, a phenomenon which became so frequent that it led to the collapse of the trillion-dollar body augmentation startup NogginGraft following the shock revelation that their popular line of ‘vat-grown’ heads were not in fact vat grown but were, rather, harvested in a manner which really should have surprised no-one except, perhaps, the obscenely wealthy and, perhaps briefly, their unwitting donors. Cashed-up transplant recipients sought desperate remedies, documented most memorably, for those who’d steered clear of the raw milk, in headlines such as ‘Heads Roll As Clinic Guillotinist Loses Count’ and ‘Severance Payout: Board Seeks Hefty Capital Outlay After Wrong Head Removed’. The federal government begrudgingly passed a law or two, removing attractive tax concessions for the double-header class but stopping short of the introduction of the hefty Extra Neck Tax which some economists had called for. 

With regulation and the threat of more of same on the way, the movement dwindled. Almost overnight the surviving members of the uberinfluentsia turned their backs on the fad, investing their funds in less outrageous pursuits such as the cloning of antimatter whippets and the construction of increasingly large Greek god mechas as a means of personal transport.

Nowadays the only reminders of the Extra Head epoch — aside, of course, from largely unread nostalgia-porn columns such as this one — are the once-wealthy beggars whose chunky hand-knitted turtlenecks may hide their decapitation scars but not their abiding shame at such a disfiguring loss of status and face.

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