(no subject)

Milliways (The Bar At The End Of The Universe)
October 27, 2003 + 1 day

Well, it looks like I've gone right down the old rabbit hole and out the other side. Should've known things were going to get stranger than usual after what Winston was saying in the car about the dead rising from the grave. . . so far today I've been slimed, arrested, summoned in front of the Mayor, sent to exterminate a god, and thrown off a building. And that was the easy part. Unless I'm having an insanely complicated hallucination, I've landed in some kind of para-chronal anomaly hovering just at the end of the entirety of the space-time continuum. I've already performed the basic Uribe assay for differentiating between hybrid auditory-visual hypnogogic hallucinations and they've all come back negative, including a full simultaneous sensory series. I don't think this is a hallucination, unless the Uribe assays perform differently after death- and I’m pretty sure I'm not dead, either. Not unless the PKE meter followed me into the afterlife and continued performing exactly the way it did back on the prime material plane. Three separate self-scans with the meter all yielded results well within the ranges I used to register on back home, so I'm going to have to apply Occam's Razor here and say I'm not dead. Just somewhere really, really weird.

From what I've been able to gather by talking to some of the locals, this place is some kind of nexus of just about any kind of possible reality you could care to mention. It's as if the probability-line matrix postulated in 'All the Myriad Ways' not only exploded outwards with every decision of every individual on every world, ever, but then contracted into a single location at its farthest ending point. At least, as far as humans go. I've met several apparent members of Homo sapiens so far, but I don't seem to have encountered any sentients outside my own species, unless they're using really realistic human disguises. Which is entirely possible, of course. I wouldn't put it past them in the slightest.

Anyway, as I said, this place gives the impression of being located at the far end of pretty much every possible reality line, including at least one that places human life on a disc-shaped world being carried through space on the backs of four elephants on the back of a turtle, none of which (other than the humans) need to breathe or eat. According to one of the fellows I talked to, there are people here who're fictional characters in other people's universes, including my own. Andrew said he hailed from a universe where Buffy the Vampire Slayer- the one from the movie- was a real person. He also mentioned that in at least one universe, she was the fictional subject of a television series- at least, from the way he was talking I’m assuming she was fictional. I forgot to verify that. The conversation ended pretty quickly after that when he spotted someone he thought he knew, so I didn't have the chance to ask him for much more information.

I think I may have gotten it anyway. Some time later- I don't seem to have a watch with me, so I can't verify the exact time- I ran into a. . . I don't even know how to describe him. I’m going to guess that anyone who dresses like that and talks the way he did was a comic book character in another reality, but hey, what do I know? I'm just a scientist in the bar at the end of Time. Apparently a scientist that this guy recognizes. The first thing he did when he saw me was ask me if I was a god, which is exactly what Gozer did just before I got zapped. It kind of went downhill from there, in the sense that things picked up speed and got out of control. The guy- I think his name might be Deadpool- knew who I was. Claimed he'd seen me in the commercials and stuff. I guess I wasn't thinking all that clearly, because if I had been, I'd have realized that there was no possible way he could have known what Gozer had said. I mean, when he repeated my own line right back at me about 'you never studied' I started to get suspicious, but come on! Any of the guys who were in jail with me might've heard me say that to Peter. The only people who heard Gozer ask me if I was a god were Venkman, Spengler and Zeddemore, and, um, Pete's girlfriend and that poor guy Tully who claimed he was the Keymaster (assuming he even heard me, since he was sort of polymorphed into a dog at the time). There is no overlap whatsoever between the two groups. None. Well, okay, he could theoretically be Egon under there, since he's the right height and there are ways around the issues of things like build and vocal tone, but there aren't enough drugs on the North American continent to get Egon singing the stuff this guy was singing. . . so we're back to the Razor again. The simplest assumption is that what Andrew was saying about one man's reality being another man's fiction, was true. To this Deadpool guy, I'm a fictional character. Movie, television, comic book, I don't know which, but as far as his reality's concerned, I'm fiction.

I don't really mind that. That's his reality. In mine, I’m real. That was the flaw in 'All the Myriad Ways', you see- the assumption that everybody in the main character's reality would respond the same way. Just because there's a million or more versions of me doesn't mean that I'm automatically going to assume any of them are any more valid than me, right? You might as well tell Scott Summers that Jean Grey is more valid than Madelyne Pryor- okay, bad example, Marvel continuity's got more holes in it than the space-time continuum around Case Western Reserve University. The important part is, as far as I'm concerned, I'm real.

I'm kind of curious how the movie or whatever it is turned out, though. I'd like to know if we won.

And, um, if I hit the ground or not.