In a shock announcement yesterday, Autism Speaks, based in Long Island, New York, stated that after years of struggle, they had finally discovered a way to cure a condition that has baffled parents and scientists alike since it was first named in the 1940s by Leo Kanner (pronounced “Conner”).

“We had been struggling with the problem of childhood autism for decades,” Dr. Walter Ransome, Autism Speaks’ chief scientist said.

“We’d always focused on training the sufferer to behave like normal people, meeting with only limited success. Then one of my researchers said to me one day, ‘Why not simply remove the autism from the victim?’ And so that’s what we switched our focus to. Now we have success only ten months down the road.”

At the press conference where the announcement had been made, I could see the children who had been brought out as demonstrations of this ‘success’ going up to various people and asking them, “Are you my mommy?” in eerily flat tones, their blank expressions unchanging.

The worst news arrived this morning, however, when the arrest of a prominent politician was announced after he was discovered literally balls deep inside one of these ‘cured’ children. A child who would never have gone off with a stranger if he had still been autistic. Another press conference was hastily called by Autism Speaks.

“We have decided to cure no more victims of autism for the foreseeable future,” Dr. Ransome stated. “We now understand that we made a mistake in focusing solely on a cure, and should instead have trained our attentions on the twin goals of removing this devastating disease and simultaneously replacing it with something else.

Unfortunately, we believed that the sufferer was a normal person frustratingly hidden behind the autism, and didn’t realise that once you removed it, all you are left with is an empty child. I and my whole team cannot apologise to the raped subject enough. Unfortunately, that is the nature of all research; mistakes sometimes get made.”