so it's emoticons that will destroy the universe?

some old-fashioned scientist or some old-timey philosopher or some old-timey quotation book writer once penned, mightily, that nature abhorred a vacuum. with the exception of a very few of our infinite universes, this holds true for every kind of particle, from electrons to bosons to kleptons to the one particular quanta we've been discussing here, the emoticon. unfortunately, the emoticon is the only subatomic particle that has no anti-particle. and double-unfortunately, the emoticon is what accounts for sadness, in fact the only true emotion that exists.

all joy is merely the absence of sadness...

ugh.




so that field we created, with all that concentrated sadness that we called the simp, is actually a field of emoticons.

and since emoticons, it would seem, flow from areas of high-sadness to areas of low-sadness... we have a simple explanation for the purpose of the universe... it is a vector for the spreading of misery.


because there is no anti-particle, it cannot be annihilated, and the level of emoticons in the universe will continue to increase until the universe is nothing more than a giant repository of grief. this is what accounts for the apparently near-infinite (and seemingly growing) amount of sadness in the universe and the dearth of happiness.

not too cheery a proposition, as you can imagine. all described, by the way, by that motherfucker skint god knows how many years ago. '

'he really had it in for us, didn't he?'

'yes he did... the bastard. so we went through his seminal, masterpiece 'why the universe appears to be fucking you,' which was, by the way the first treatise on emotional calculus and predicted the existence of the emoticon. it was not a terribly well received paper, but hey... genius is never understood in its own time, i guess.

in it, he says that, while the emoticon field, once created cannot  be destroyed, it can be moved. since it flows from high-density to low-density areas, then we just had to get it in proximity to another low-density emoticon field and it will migrate on its own. the trick was trying to find a place that we could send the damn thing without it coming back.

see... another of skint's predictions was a kind of resonance, where the field would oscillate between high- and low-density areas until it reached an equilibrium. once the field moves, the place it moved from becomes cheerier, and the place it moved to becomes sadder. the field recognizes this imbalance and then returns... this harmonic resonance grows and grows, like making little waves in a bathtub, and the resulting mood swings can start affecting physical structures, turning other quanta into emoticons...

in other words, the sadness starts turning the physical world into more sadness... it'll keep going back and forth like that until it destroys everything and turning both areas into a kind of pure emoticon slurry.

then that field would be much larger and much closer to other areas of low-emoticon density, and then starting another resonance and so on and so on and then suddenly oops we've ended the universe by making it be sad to death.

this we wanted to avoid.

but where were we going to find a place where there was both a substantial enough low-density field to attract the simp, and some barrier to put up once he went over there?

'you needed a place where people were doing something naughty behind closed doors.'

'and what's the one thing everybody loves?'

'the 'holes... you sent him to the 'holes. that's where i found him. you magnificent bastard!'

'with all the genital manipulation, fellatio, analingus, brainalingus, and generally high levels of perversity going on, the 'holes were the one place guaranteed to attract the simp's attention... after all, if someone is really enjoying themselves, the simp is going to want to go there and fuck it up... it's his nature. so all we had to do was open up all the 'holes on the station and let the simp get a whiff of the sexiness that was ensuing in the void.

'and?'

'what do you mean and?'

'what happened?'

'what the fuck do you think happened. it worked... until your dumb ass brought him back. i still don't understand how you, of all people, could be happy enough to attract the simp's attention, to distract him from all the fuckery going on in there? what possible joy could you be experiencing? what was going on in your universe? why were you so fucking cheery?'

i looked at me for a while... it could have been the booze. it could have the eons i hadn't been home. it could have been any number of things... but for once in this angryspaceman's long, hard, largely useless life, i felt the need to be honest... hell... if i couldn't be honest with myself, then there was no point at all.

'i was finally going home. to see skip. to see flapjack. cosmoose. cute little galactopus girl. i was one step away from hangar 23, from zargle and mal-aka and spajjy. to cheat the tourists and fight with captain spacefuck. to go back to those few things that made this piece of shit universe tolerable. i was almost home.'

for once, i had nothing else to say to myself.

'i don't know if you can go back. but i do know that we need to get rid of the simp again. before he grows too powerful.'

'seems like this is a your universe sort of problem... my problem is i need to get home... what the fuck do i care if your simp is back here?'

'what do you think will happen if the simp gets powerful? he'll be able to break out of the void... he's already done it once, following you here. so if he manages to gobble up this entire place, he'll travel from universe to universe. eventually all existence, in every conceivable combination, will just be pure negativity.'

'it isn't now?'

both of us chuckled a bit at that one. emoticons be damned.

'so you are saying we need to save the universes?'

'so it would seem.'