Multiverse of Sanity

Content Warning: The following story contains controversial political and religious satire. Many seldom-targeted demographics of society are sure to find offense. Therefore, if you are racist, homophobic, excessively wealthy, anyone currently working for the United States government, or a fan of the new Jurassic World movie, please don’t read this.

Without, the tempestuous winds of night swirled and slashed in a battle of invisible sucks and slashes. Within, I was playing on my Xbox. Madden 2012. Back when the Giants were good. It was a typical Friday evening. Ordinary, that was, until it wasn’t.

On my screen, Victor Cruz was salsa dancing in the end zone, and in my recliner, I was as happy as an idiot at a poultry auction. Suddenly, the lights dimmed, and the figure of a man appeared before me from seeming nothingness. He had the appearance of an ancient Roman. There was the distinctive white toga, the laurel wreath in his curly hair, the bronze Mediterranean skin, and, of course, the prominent unibrow.

“Who are you?” I inquired in a tremulous voice that betrayed my fear at his arrival.

“In my time, a man of great fame,

Perhaps now, unknown by my name,

The poet Wurgil am I, sent here to guide,

Now hop on my back, let’s go for a ride.”

The great poet Wurgil? I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. Was this a hallucination? Had I hit my head in a Madden celebration? (It seemed his rhyming style was catchy) Was the batch of Yoo Hoo I was drinking tainted?

Never one to sniff a gift horse in the mouth, I rightly assumed that I had been chosen to receive this legendary visitor because of some great distinction of mine. I couldn’t have told you then what that rare quality was, nor can I elaborate now on particularly what it might have been that set me apart for this opportunity. Regardless of my inadequate credentials, however, it appeared that I had been designated worthy of some great opportunity. Without waiting for a second invitation, I piggied up onto Wurgil’s back, got two fistfuls of his lovely locks, and held on tightly.

What happened next is hard to describe, so I won’t try very hard. Assume a thorough explanation would involve many cleverly contrived literary devices. From underneath his toga, Wurgil removed an ornamented box. Multiple objects were pulled from said container. One was a ring that Wurgil slipped over two fingers. Another was a book with burnt-blackened pages. The third was an eyeball sticker that Wurgil placed in the center of his forehead. Lastly, he pulled forth a deflated bicycle tire and a pickle spear. I suspect the last item may have just been his evening snack. Suddenly, Wurgil began chanting something, spinning in circles, gyrating a bit, and mumbling more incoherantly than I would have thought a practitioner would in the middle of an important spell. I think the pickle spear was getting in the way. Finally, in a moment of sorcery too convoluted to tell in a story of such brevity, but definitely involving totally plausible interactions between the mystical objects in play and the obvious magical abilities of their handler (assume words like quantum, flux, and boson would definitely have been used in the description), a portal was opened between dimensions, allowing us access to a parallel universe. It was an actual doorway to the Multiverse!

The gateway glowed and pulsed with an unearthly magnificence. The thought of journeying into it overwhelmed me with trepidation.

“Are, uh, we going in there, Wurgil?” I stammered out through chattering teeth.

“If the greatest gift you want to find,

Then grow a pair, and free your mind.”

With that simple bit of wisdom, Wurgil jumped into the pulsating window, and I rode him hard like a redneck on a mechanical bull. Also, since I’m sure you’re wondering, Wurgil only ever spoke in rhyming couplets. When I asked him about that, he assured me that all of the greatest poets throughout history only spoke in rhyming couplets: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Shel Silverstein, etc.

What happened next can best be described as bad CGI. Imagine Bill and Ted’s phone booth making the 2001: A Space Odyssey voyage. After bumping about in the strobing ether for a couple of minutes, Wurgil and I popped out of a portal exactly like the one we had jumped into. It was located in the precise location of the other as well, in the living room of my home. On the TV was a paused game of Madden, the Giants once again winning by a comfortable margin.

“We travelled through space and ended up back here?” I asked, confused.

“The here you see is someplace new,

Another universe just for you!”

That was when I fully understood that Wurgil had opened a portal to the Multiverse. We had traveled through the wormhole and ended up in a universe that was no doubt very much like my own. But, it was probably also vastly different based upon some decision someone made in the past that would have altered the reality for everyone. I couldn’t wait to explore!

First, I looked around my house. Nothing seemed any different than it had in my reality, except for the fact that I wasn’t there (although, I guess I was?). Week old pizza was still in the fridge. My Maya Angelou poster in her sexy Porgy and Bess outfit was still hanging on the wall over my bed. My special “Life is Short - Lick the Bowl” decorative sign still hung over my toilet. Even my dead plants were still dead. I figured an alternate me might do a bit better at watering, but I guess not.

Next, we went outside, but a glance around the neighborhood confirmed that everything was the same out there as well. We went back inside and turned on the news. Everything being reported was just the same as back in my home universe. Inflation rates were up. Job growth was down. Innocent people were dying in Palestine and Ukraine. Being a late-night talk show host was still the most dangerous job around.

“What’s the deal, Wurgil? Why aren’t there any crazy new diseases or people with hot dog fingers?”

“If the ultimate discovery you want to make,

Then another journey we must undertake.”

“Oh. You mean, we have to go to a different place within the Multiverse?”

“Indeed,

You steed.”

It wasn’t Wurgil’s best work, but I understood his meaning. We needed to get back into the portal and try a different existence. And this time, he would be riding on my back.

The following hours are almost too boring to recount. We jumped from universe to universe, taking turns being the piggy, and always finding precisely the same things. There were no changes from one existence to another. All those crazy copycat Multiverse movies were wrong. The Multiverse was a lie!

I wasn’t sure what to think. Part of me found solace in this, thinking that maybe there truly was a higher power that governed everything, and therefore each universe was the same because each was as God had ordained. Part of me was also grateful to have yet another of my personal beliefs confirmed, that being the belief that all of those Hollywood movies that piggyback off each other, even worse than Wurgil and me, were grounded in so much nonsense. But, when I asked Wurgil to confirm these suspicions, he cryptically replied:

“The entire truth for you to know,

You once more must to your own time go.”

So I hopped on Wurgil’s back one last time, careful to avoid his saddle sores, and we went back to my home universe. And that’s when everything changed!

You see, when I returned to my universe, I did so with a knowledge no one else possessed. Namely, I knew that multiverses were bullshit and that there were no distinctions between any of them. Paradoxically, this created a situation where the me of this universe was different than the me I never met in the other universes (which was definitely me if Maya Angelou’s glistening gams had anything to say about it). Since the me of this universe (henceforward just referred to as me) now had this knowledge, and since I was the only me of this universe, ontological suggestion confirms that present me (or just me, sorry) must have had this knowledge and these critical thinking skills all along. Since this wisdom was gained through common sense deduction, I came home to a world (or maybe always existed in a world?) that operated differently. It seemed that my new gifts of thinking for myself and appreciating originality were shared societal traits, and they led to a universe built on common sense, fresh thinking, and logic. And holy cow, it was different!

The first difference I noticed was that my paused Madden game was a newer one that now showed Travis Kelce doing his famous cha cha dance in the end zone. I hated that I might be a Chiefs fan now, but it did make more sense than being a Giants fan. I quickly jumped online to see what else was different.

History had totally changed. Since our world was now one ruled by reason, basically everything had morphed. There had never been World Wars I or II, as the destructiveness of wars appalled normal decent folk. I checked to see if the reason the Second World War didn’t exist was because Hitler made it through art school, but the internet confirmed that Adolf Hitler was a shitty artist, so I guess that was never going to happen. He was also a racist douchebag; therefore, he never ended up as a world leader. I actually had a hard time finding out anything about him until I went to a very weird pornographic website called www.fecalfaces.com. I won’t tell you what I found there…

The narratives had changed for many previous world leaders. Fidel Castro became a professional baseball player instead of starting an insurrection. Mohandes Gandhi spent some time in prison for child molestation. Vladimir Putin was a topless calendar model.

Religion was completely different, too. Apparently, when the Romans wanted to execute Jesus, they decided to do it in the most original way possible. So, instead of the overdone crucifixion thing, they chose to have Him fight it out with wild beasts in the Coliseum. Of course, this also ran the risk of being unoriginal too, so the beasts they dedicated on were a group of giraffes. It turns out Jesus was still martyred when the giraffes trampled Him to death after what I guess was an epic fight. The result, millennia later, however, was a complete change in iconography. Instead of the ubiquitous cross, churches distinguished themselves with different images of stampeding giraffes. Some were angry-looking; others were more somber. Some were stacked and others bunched.

Furthermore, packs of giraffes go by many names: packs, journeys, and towers, to name a few. These ended up being the names of different denominations of Christianity, e.g., Tower Christians, Journey Fellowshipers, and the Seventh-day Packers. People everywhere had giraffe tattoos and giraffe necklaces. It was crazy.

Somehow, the iconography and name of the Mormon church were unchanged. That was something I would have to investigate further.

There had also never been any religious warfare. In this existence, followers of Jesus understood His commandment to love one another, so there had never been any crusades. The same was true for the practitioners of all of the world’s religions, and this practice had eliminated all of the jihads and genocides ever extant.

My jump to American politics unearthed even more startling revelations. Instead of the list of slave-raping, Native American-killing, eugenicists that made up the roster of U.S. presidents I was used to, now a list of great humanitarians and minorities were the alumni of the Oval Office. Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr., and Caesar Chavez had all been Commander-in-Chief. This was startling to say the least, but I’ll admit I was even more shocked when I saw that Donald Trump had still made it into office! What the hell? Investigating more closely, however, I discovered that he was only a one-term president, elected as an outsider on the promise to clear politicians out of Washington. I guess that desire still exists even in a common-sense universe. Wondering what happened between the first and second terms, I did a quick search and discovered from a number of very reputable sources that he was a racist, deviant, misogynistic, felonious, unscrupulous pervert who was rightfully sent to prison after being convicted of committing more crimes than I’ve had hot breakfasts. Now things were making more sense.

Curious who the new president might be, since Trump was indisposed, I searched it up and discovered it was none other than Keanu Reeves. He ran on the platform “Be excellent to each other” and won by a landslide. His approval rating currently sat at 98%, his only detractors being people who didn’t appreciate his role in Knock, Knock. Thinking it would have been the fourth Matrix movie that had turned off his constituents, I discovered that the fourth Matrix movie didn’t exist! Neither did any Jurassic Park movies after the first two nor 3/4ths of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Most of the major blockbusters of the past few years didn’t exist either. There was still only one Beetlejuice, one version of The Crow, no Fantastic Four movies, and no live-action Disney movies. In their place were a variety of films with seemingly no connection to each other or any other previously created works. It was crazy!

After a few hours, Wurgil materialized in front of me again, and I expressed to him my shock and bewilderment. “This is totally nuts, Wurgil! Can life really be this good now?”

Wurgil replied.

“I’m more than just some spell caster,

The changes are all true, my master.”

“Woah, woah, woah, Wurgil! Stop right there. I do not want to be called Master, my dude.”

That was when Wurgil explained to me that since slavery had never existed, the word “master” never took on a negative connotation. He just called me master because I had a Master’s Degree, which made perfect sense. Since he said it all in his Wurgil way, this explanation took about half an hour, so I have summarized it here.

That’s about all there is to tell. Wurgil disappeared back into the firmament, and I clicked the television over to South Park, which now had new episodes weekly. It seemed less funny than I remembered it being, though. The current episode was trying to make fun of President Reeves’s enormous penis. I guess there was just less fuel for the fire. Oh well. If that’s the biggest sacrifice of living in a common-sense, originality-loving universe, I guess I can cope.

The End

Author’s note: Unfortunately, the previous is a work of fiction. Now, since I have published it online (under a pseudonym! My real name is not Colin Smith!), I have had to go into hiding. Despite my fine Northern European lineage and Anglo-Saxon stock, ICE is trying to locate and deport me to a Salvadorian prison. If this is my last story for a while, you’ll know what happened…