It’s the future. Everyone pretended to be shocked when they ran out of gas. And were shocked for real when it turned out that Missouri was the key to everything.
New York City was positive it was the center of the universe, but apparently not.
Around mid-fall in 2043, a farmboy in Lebanon, Missouri, USA took a walk along US 66 and saw what he thought was a puddle. All the light was going into that “puddle” because it was in fact the universe’s calmest black hole ever. They called in some science types and discovered that this particular black hole was kind of like a donut…but a donut of time not of fat.
You know that old question: “who would you have lunch with if you could have lunch with anyone in the world”? Well, that came true. That is, dead people weren’t exactly recreated, but rather snatched from their place elsewhen for a brief interlude here in this dimension. Spinning around in the donut as it were.
If you think about it, that’s kind of rude to all of us… interrupting the living and all.
But who’s watching, anyway?
—
Of course, someone had to put a stamp on everything, and McDonald’s was the only company with enough money to do it. Up went the golden arches and now you can have Ghandi with fries or whatever else you want. Fast food is the way to enlightenment. Think of the super sizing!
Incidentally, McDonald’s is president now, and things seem to be on the up and up.
As one could imagine, things got pretty busy. People wanted to have lunch with all sorts of folks, and it got to the point where you had to make reservations or you simply weren’t getting in. With the whole planet making reservations, you had to decide who you’d meet right around the time you were born. It was that busy. A lot of people ended up having lunch with Santa Claus. You’d think that was a waste but it turns out he was an Anatolian monk.
McDonald’s being McDonald’s, you’d think they would have figured out a way to clone the place and open up more restaurants, right? And they tried. They tried. Without another black hole, they thought maybe robots could simulate the whole thing but they couldn’t get the artificial intelligence to work. It couldn’t duplicate a conversation with a woman. It’s just too complicated.
—
I’ve been a waiter here for some time. You have to pay for the privilege because you end up hearing what a lot of really smart people have to say about a lot of things. Except that, as staff, you never get to ask yourself. I once heard a guy ask Jesus: “So what did people say when they were mad… before they said Jesus! ?”
Jesus just kinda looked at him. I wanted to see if there was anything else coming but I had to refill a water.
Another guy was talking to Hitler as long as he could. When I asked him why he wanted to talk to him so much he said that he thought maybe if he kept him busy here, another dimension might be spared his mania.
It’s a strange place to work. With all the input, I don’t think I could ever decide who I’d want to talk to if I was allowed. I think I’d probably ask the guy that invented Missouri what he was thinking about all this.
At any rate, I quit after one guy had lunch with himself and couldn’t find out anything. That more or less settled it for me: there’s probably something better on TV.
