I had thought this up back in January, intended as an April Fool's joke entry in the project. Since the project wasn't running on April 1, I forgot about it. Anyway, I ran across it again, and I might as well post it.
Anyone who's read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will at least groan at it.
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The myriad of universes gave Jerahl headaches.
More precisely, the thought of trying to sort them out did.
Working from deep inside the Council’s main building on the recently-raised southern continent, Jerahl had been charged with trying to keep straight which universes the Council had already been to, which ones they were currently on, and which ones they wanted to go to next. Normally, this was a fairly straightforward task. After all, the Experiment was a fairly well-run operation, everyone filling their reports and generally keeping a good track on where they were, where they had been, and so forth. However, that had all come to a crashing end about five minutes ago, with the sound of a thousand people all saying “whop.”
When Jerahl had heard this, he thought that this was a very odd thing to have happen. He was alone in this room, and in this entire building for that matter, and having someone bring a thousand people here just to say “whop” struck him as slightly off-kilter. Trying to make some sense of this, he turned around, just in time to see eleven white robots disembark from their strangely white ship, which was currently embedded in one of his walls, destroy half of the building. He stood up to yell at them to stop, what the zark did they think they were doing, coming in here and destroy his perfectly good building?
“Erm…” he said. His legs realized that they had unbent for no good reason whatsoever, and since his feet were complaining about trying to hold up all this dead weight up there, they sat Jerahl back down. His brain, still stuck out of gear from his failure to yell at the robots, had nothing to do with the process. “Umm…” he restated. The robots were just about done with that half of the building by this point, and turning back towards the other half, Jerahl’s half. “Uhhh…” he said, trying to emphasize his point.
As suddenly as they came, the eleven white robots piled back into their ship, and with the sound of a thousand people all saying “foop” they disappeared. Jerahl sat there, mind still stuck in neutral, trying to make sense of this. The chair slowly spun back towards his desk, where he made another discovery. While his back had been turned, someone else had destroyed the other half of the building. Fortunately, they had left him his desk, although the papers which had been on it were all gone. “Wha…” he pondered. Five minutes passed like this. Occasionally his mouth would open and attempt to speak, but with his brain still not functioning, it never could get anything to sound right. Finally, however, it slipped on down into gear and nearly tore itself to pieces as it hit the ground.
Out of the smoke and destruction, both in his brain and all around him, Jerahl realized two things. One, he really needed to start keeping his back-up files in a separate building from his originals – namely, anywhere else in Zeal but here. Two, sorting out universes gave him headaches. He hadn’t even started yet, and he could tell that it would. Assuming he was allowed to work on it. With the way the Council was these days, something like this could get him exiled to some world, down to the surface, even. Or, if they were in a good mood, it could merely kill him. He had the sinking feeling that they weren’t likely to be in a good mood.
Oddly enough, a proposed entry in the best-selling
The Zealot’s Guide to the Kingdom: Hitchhiking Across Zeal on Five Silver a Day defined the Council as “They’ll be the first against the wall when the Revolution comes.” Needless to say, the reporter who proposed the entry didn’t live very long. However, a copy of the
Guide which fell through a gate from two thousand years in the future had a historical entry on the Council. It simply read “They were the first against the wall when the Revolution came.”
Jerahl was still sitting there in shock. After all, having a building destroyed around you has a habit of doing things like that. Therefore, when another ship descended from the sky and landed in the building’s ruins directly in front of him, he barely even noticed it was there. The landing ramp unfolded. He didn’t see it. An alien exited and walked towards him carrying what looked like a clipboard. This time Jerahl looked up, but still didn’t quite understand that the being was there.
“Jerahl?” the alien said. Jerahl simply stared up at him.
“Jerahl Arcinto of Zeal?” Jerahl nodded weakly, having no clue what was going on. His brain had been subjected to too much strangeness today to do much more.
“You’re a jerk,” the alien said. “You’re an ignorant, pea-brained jerk.” Jerahl merely kept staring as the alien checked off something on the clipboard, boarded his ship, and roared off into the sky.
Jerahl simply sighed as the Agents came and got him. “What now?” he said. After today, he figured it couldn’t get much worse.
He was wrong.
