A small black ant crawled through the minuscule crevice in the Bakers’ house and made her way across the linoleum, heading straight for the dog food. It was such a wonderfully steady source of nourishment, she certainly wasn’t expecting to find that the bowl was empty. Licked clean, as a matter of fact. Not a single crumb remained.
Disappointed and confused, she began searching for her fellow nest members, hoping that they had found a new source of food. She went up onto the kitchen counter and began following a few other ants, all of which had their sights set on the bread crust that Thomas had left on his plate rather than throwing away, like he was supposed to.
Not wanting his mother to scold him, Thomas went back for the crust, only to notice the ants it had attracted. Panicking, he proceeded to squish all of them with his index finger and accidentally threw the plate into the garbage along with the crust.
Just as he was about to retrieve it, his father called his name, saying it was time to go and Thomas needed to put his shoes on and did he remember to grab a jacket just in case it got colder today and please, Thomas, we’ve been waiting on you more than enough for today so just try to hurry up, okay?
Heart beating at a mile a minute, Thomas put on his sneakers and grabbed the coat that was just a little too small, running out the door past his parents. They rolled their eyes and smiled at each other, then went out. The whole family piled into the car and began driving.
It was a rather small and unremarkable gray sedan with a dent on the front passenger door, and as it got on the freeway, it only grew more and more indistinguishable from the surrounding vehicles. Gray sedans passed by and fell behind, some different models, some different makes, yet with barely any significant design differences.
Eventually, it even began to blend in with the gray pickup trucks, the red sedans, the white vans, and the blue SUVs as it was forced to wait in traffic caused by a person being a little too confident that he could read texts and keep an eye on the road at the same time.
His death made it on the local news and a few people blogged aggressively about it in the hopes that the state of Arizona would consider banning cell phone usage while driving. However, sparse media coverage and a few shut-ins complaining on the internet would, predictably, have no effect, although perhaps some smug ass would use this fact to try and dissuade his brother from going to Arizona, not because he’s truly concerned about his personal safety, but because he’s such an egotistical dipshit he feels a relative moving to a place he dislikes would be a personal insult to him.
In reality, though, provided the ass mentioned above lives in the United States, he has very little ground over his brother, as the USA itself is a bit of a laughingstock nowadays.
Then again, the rest of the planet Earth doesn’t have much ground over America, because while there’s a country here and there that’s managed to get their shit together, a disturbingly large majority of them don’t even know where the entirety of their shit is and have no interest in locating all of it.
In its own solar system, however, Earth could either be considered highly superior or vastly inferior, depending on how you view humans or sentient beings in general. It’s very hard to visit Earth and not bump into a human, whereas a good chunk of planets don’t even seem capable of supporting any life whatsoever. Humans have even checked Mars, just to be certain, and much to their disappointment they found exactly what that hateful voice in the back of their heads had been screeching the entire time: very little, if not absolutely nothing in terms of life.
Amongst the tens of billions of solar systems in its galaxy, however, the Sun’s was nothing special; some systems had two planets inhabited by some form of life, and a few had even given rise to species that were managing to travel through the cosmos at a much faster rate than Earth’s inhabitants seemed to be going at.
The Milky Way was, in fact, a rather large galaxy when put up against many of the other galaxies in the Local Group, but once compared to the others in the Virgo Supercluster, it began to pale in comparison. Not a single one of its beings had managed to leave its galaxy, whereas an as-of-yet-undiscovered by Earth, Re’eplituyu, Qa, Lirnikikik, and Frosbelltucht galaxy had already produced several species that were happily zipping around the supercluster, eliminating every planet that could possibly rival them in any way.
The Virgo Supercluster, unfortunately, was nothing special amongst the sea of superclusters and other observable bits of matter that mad up a paltry five percent or so of the universe.
Even the remaining twenty-seven percent of dark matter and sixty-eight percent of dark energy was amusingly insignificant when compared with the octillions of nonillions of decillions of infinity of universes that bobbed and hummed along in their own little sea, watched over dutifully by the bickering gods, Abraxas and Erebus; Abraxas, the God of All That Does Exist, was a literally chicken-headed deity with the body of a fit and moderately attractive young Caucasian homo sapiens male and two snakes for legs; Erebus, the God of All That Does Not Exist, was merely wisps of a smoke-like substance contained roughly in a ball, with two glowing yellow orbs acting as eyes.
Erebus presents a bit of a paradox, being a god of nonexistence that, well, exists, but that was what Siqewerichcheul(or Siq) decided he would be, and so he was. Siq, being a member of the Clown clique, reveled in its own ridiculousness, and made its shoebox into a sort of prison for all those involved or forced to exist in it. Their point to existing, Siq had decided, was nothing more than entertainment; Abraxas and Erebus would bicker for Siq’s sake, and the inhabitants of the universes would bicker for Abraxas’ sake.
Siq had a far simpler shoebox than a large amount of its classmates, with some having dozens of deities to take care of certain major characteristics and others having no deities at all, instead choosing to stage interactions between the inhabitants of each panverse without allowing them to break arbitrary and complex rules.
All thirty-one of them, however, had no idea how much work it was to keep all of their panverses so delightfully complicated and unique, and I believe that if I were ever allowed to meet these creations of mine, I would simply strangle each and every one of them, then take a refreshing nap on their corpses, as their conception has led to these eons of tedious work I will never be able to escape until I run out of ideas completely.
It’s a terrifically dull existence I lead: day in and day out, I sit at this typewriter on my uncomfortable stool and am forced to type whatever comes to mind. Day in and day out, I have three twenty minute long breaks along with the thousands of other poor souls trapped here. Day in and day out, I am allowed to have four hours of sleep outside of breaks. Day in and day out, I plan my suicide, hoping that perhaps a guard will stray close enough for me to take the blade from his pocket and stick it through my eye. Day in and day out, I am disappointed to still be alive.
I’m sure this is a disappointment I’ll never be able to escape, as the Overlords do not tolerate any sort of unscheduled dying or sleeping. As long as I still have ideas, I will live.
I silently kick myself every day for not lying in the old days, when the Overlords were so much more trusting and easy to take advantage of. I was one of the few Creatives who chose to be honest and stay typing, while the rest claimed that they had run out quickly and were given a quick and merciful death. Nowadays, it’s drawn out and excruciatingly painful, as their last Inspirational Seminar explained, as a Creative’s creativity is its only useful asset and it must be punished for living a worthless existence.
They’ve produced many other Creatives since then, so I’m not sure how harmful one or two useless creatures could be, but I haven’t got any say in the matter.
Well, hey, wait a moment, you’re probably saying. I don’t know what half of this stuff is or looks like.
Eventually, I’ll manage to explain most of what everything is, but you’ll never understand what it looks like, and I’m afraid whatever explanation you receive will be limited to terms that your mind can easily understand so we don’t need any sort of appendix or prerequisite courses, thus rendering it mostly inaccurate to reality.
To be fair, I similarly am not able to comprehend things greater than my own reality, so even if I could explain things in my own terms, it still wouldn’t be as accurate as I’d like. But it’ll do; a rough description is surely better than no description at all. You’ll get the gist of it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get back to the story. Let’s hope that’s the last bit of fourth-wall breaking I’ll need to do today.
Sometimes, when the Overlords come to visit, they allow three randomly selected Creatives to decide on one yes-or-no question to ask them. If any of them attempt to contact a Creative who was not chosen, they are killed and no question is asked; if a Creative who wasn’t chosen attempts to contact one who was, they are killed, but the chosen three can still decide on a question.
So far, the questions have been: “Will we be having a Taco Tuesday this month?”(no), “Will we ever be freed while still alive?”(no), “Will we ever be told why we’re here?”(no), “What’s your favorite color?”(that’s not a yes or no question and we don’t know what colors are; you three are to be executed at second break), “Do you ever get tired of being assholes?”(no), and “Will you say no to this question?”(you three are to be executed immediately).
This time, I was chosen. We huddled together in a group, far away from the other Creatives, and began discussion. We had thirty minutes to decide.
“I’m hungry,” the slightly taller one said. “We should ask if we’ll be having Wing Wednesday this month.”
“We should ask if they know the meaning of life,” the slightly shorter one said. “I bet they’ve never thought about it before; the question will eat them up inside, I just know it.”
“Eating sounds good. We should ask if we’ll be having Thuringian Sausage Thursday.”
“You’re both idiots and I hate you,” I said. I didn’t really mean it, but I had never said it to anyone before and was curious to see what reactions it might elicit.
“Don’t worry, friend,” the shorter one purred, reaching out to touch my arm. “I understand that it may seem confusing to think about such massive things, but someday you’ll get over that petty hatred of yours.”
“Consumption sounds good. We should ask if we’ll be having Surstromming Sunday this month.”
“Well, I didn’t really mean what I said in your case, Shorter One, but I do believe I’m beginning to hate Taller One. Can’t you talk about something that isn’t food?”
The shorter one laughed and reached out to touch my other arm. At this point, I was feeling quite uncomfortable and could only think about getting away from him when it suddenly hit me.
“We should ask if there’s a way to escape,” I declared confidently.
“That’s all well and good, but I’m still not sure if we’ll be having Marmite Monday this month. I believe that’s a much more urgent issue.”
“Say, Short One, would you happen to know what the punishment is for killing a fellow Creative?”
“Let me think about it.” He withdrew both of his hands and placed them underneath his lip in deep thought. “I believe it’s execution.”
“I see. What about hitting a fellow Creative?”
“I believe that would also get you executed.”
“I see. How could I harm him without being executed?”
“By escaping before you’re caught, I think.”
“I see.”
We were all silent for a good moment.
“So,” I said, “what do you all think of my question?”
“I think it’s a very good question and we should ask it,” the shorter one said eagerly.
The taller one raised his hand in protest. “I think--”
“Then it’s settled,” the shorter one said. “We’ll ask them if it’s possible to escape.”
We shuffled over to the menacing Overlords, who were triple our height, shadowy creatures with three enormous mouths on alternating sides of their body and one eternally infuriated eye with two pupils. Every syllable they spoke was said seamlessly from a different mouth, starting at the top and going to the bottom, then back to the top until they were done with their sentence.
“What question have you decided to ask?”
“Is there any way to escape this place?” I asked.
The three Overlords looked at each other, then looked back at us, giving us disapproving glares, then went back to looking at each other, until they finally looked at us again.
“Yes,” one said, and with that, they slithered away.
