Eternal Crapshoot of the Sleepy Mind

Then two friends of mine wandered onto the road not realizing what sort of peril they were in. Without thinking, I ran after them and intercepted the alien judge as they were sneaking up on them, saying I was the one who'd be competing out of the three. However, they had to show me officially documented rules first.

Annoyed, the alien went away for a bit and the three of us made it further down the path, my friends none the wiser.Then the alien reappeared with a parchment covered in glitter and gel pen with a few sentences explaining what counted as a pun and what the dire consequences were for failure. I kept reading the sheet over and over, scanning it really closely.The alien got impatient, but we were almost to the end of the road, so I said, okay let me just take care of something really quick. I pulled out my phone and started looking at watches for sale.

Th alien exclaimed "what in hell are you doing!?!?" 

To which I replied, as my friends just exited the path, “I’m doing what I've been doing from the start. I'm buying time."

There, he discovered me and started to explain that when a universe is finally visited by its architects, the intelligent beings are supposed to seek the knowledge of how to make their own universes and continue the chain, but apparently we weren’t ready. Or maybe he had just messed up the transit, because as we spoke I slowly grew to his same size. I asked if he had people from a universe up with him, at which point Magic the Gathering’s Liliana appeared to say she was from his parent universe and was quite disappointed by how this all went.

And for some reason, the next two questions that came to mind did not go through my self-preservation filter at all because I blurted out “so can you all die like we can? Is there a first one at the top of the chain I could get to?”

Apparently beings up the chain heard that and did not like it. Space all around us started unfolding like someone unfolding the lid of a cardboard box to let something new inside. Liliana chastised me for asking such obviously threatening questions, and our creator set about protecting his/my universe from the new people popping into the room every few seconds as it fluxed in space.

For example, the midwest/Montana/Yellowstone area was taken over by a steampunk Teddy Roosevelt hunting expedition. The deep south became a dilapidated biopunk Southern Gothic realm ruled by Harry S Truman.

So! Eleanor was constantly aware of how often she failed to get into heaven and trapped in a place she knew was full of fakers but didn’t know who were the fakers. Tahani had to go through the realization that she wasn’t actually good enough over and over again, Chidi had to cope with the question of how to earn the good place, since now it turns out every action he performs is explicitly a test. And of course, the search for a cheater’s way out put a strain on all of them as they got caught again and again and Chidi was opposed every time.

He ended up giving a lecture to the lowest published department on campus, the ornithologists (They called themselves bird brains, and wore various bird hats) in which he demonstrated how to hack into the government’s omnipresent cameras and hook the feeds up to an adaptive AI for sorting and tracking bird species, a far more effective method than their binoculars and notebooks.

Upon closer inspection he realized that a good third of the box was taken up by a massive black scorpion. After appropriately freaking out, he asked how the fuck it got in there and if it was alive. As it happens I had bought it (dead) when I got the almonds and dumped it into the same box in a moment of bravado to force me to conquer irrational fears since the thing was harmless. 

Of course, while Magnus was out, an earthquake set off a chain reaction that led to everyone in the party space getting trapped in an explosion (faulty fantasy gas mains) and burning to death. Magnus ran back to try and stop it, but he was too far and it happened too fast. He crumpled to the ground shaking and screaming. Griffin said told Travis that Magnus had just enough experience with plane hopping, that in his moment of intense emotion he could make contact with one person who’d been at the party, so who would he choose?

I looked frantically through the text book section, but only found really dry textbooks on fluidics and thermodynamics of all things. No statics or dynamics or design. I happened to spot a book that I wanted to buy for personal reasons and tucked it away, then continued to the history section, self improvement, physics, all sections let me down. With time running out I tried to grab the stuffy old heat transfer textbook but couldn’t even find the section. What sort of school is so poorly organized? And why didn’t they have anything cool? And why should my admittance depend on their selection anyway!?

Exasperated, I looked at my personal selection. It was a really hard sell. But it was an honest one. I went back to my interviewer, plopped the book down and said that textbook knowledge isn’t who I am. That’s just what I use. This book, at least based on title, reflects the sort of sideways thinking and blending of fields that I specialize in. It also represents the humor I bring to every project as well as my earnestness, caring deeply and lovingly about things that others might find insignificant.

Then, we had the convergence. Five gas giants formed a ring in the inky sky. Earth, we discovered, had 4 cousins such that the five completed another ring around the first. Orchestral music seeped from the voids between each body as every earth’s moon slid into place between it and its Jupiter. As they did, the humans had their gaze torn away from the cosmic event towards a lightening on the horizon. We had no sun, yet it seemed to be rising. The eastern sky, for the first time in living memory, turned grey to pink to palest blue.