Prologue LK1
From The Encyclopaedia Expurgatia
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Throughout history, and quite probably before that, philosophers and scholars have tried, with little success, to answer the great questions of the universe.
And although these questions, which have led to mental anguish and the burning of heretics, are not as difficult to answer as one might think, it is still not in the least surprising that these self-proclaimed intellectuals never found the answers.
This was for two primary reasons.
The first reason was this: these logicians, though the upper crust of their species, were still quite human. And humans, for those who have never encountered any, were pretty well the most illogical and useless organisms in the known multiverse.
Case in point: from the human perspective, there was no known multiverse; there were but a handful of planets in the distant, cold, dimly-lit system of Sol, ten billion lightyears from the current centre of Universe 97D. These humans were very dumb, very boring, and, on the whole, very content with killing whales and fearing mitochondria.
It is, to some [mostly members of the homosapien species] important to be assured that there were, indeed, some humans who were less qualified for mandatory euthanasia. Ironically enough, the most remarkable human was a carpenter-turned-messiah who was put to death anyway. His name was Joshua, in the English tongue, though that was changed, over the centuries, through several redundant homosapien languages, to Jesus, which, incidentally, is pronounced so that anyone saying the name sounds as though he’s saying cheese whilst hiccoughing. But this messiah’s unwed parent was reported to have been rather a shy extraterrestrial named Jehovah, who was generally regarded as a deity.
Verily, this messiah was half extraterrestrial and therefore said little for the intelligence of the homosapiens, except, of course, that they were smart enough to elect someone inhuman as their leader.
Based on the concept of the supernatural deity and the life of the messiah Jesus née Joshua, religions were founded. And for two thousand years after the messiah died, humans were killed globally for finding flaws in each other’s faiths. There was a compendium of records: a collection known as the Holy Bible; but there were so many versions of the book, and so many versions of the entire concept, that, in the end, no one really knew what to believe about any of it.
And then, by the end of the twentieth century following the messiah’s reported lifetime, this bible had fallen into the hands of a cult known as televangelists: a motley crew with moronic accents who, in the name of the deceased carpenter, took a lot of money from a lot of people and went to jail.
Blessed are the Jesusmakers.
That humans were dumb isn’t open to debate; but their taxonomic stupidity was an important factor in their inability to answer the great questions of the universe.
The second reason was simple: they never thought to ask a lizard.
But this isn’t about the lizards and their vast, untapped resources of knowledge; not yet, anyway. And it is not yet about the stupidity of religion, mankind’s greatest cultural faux pas.
This is about one of the great questions—one of the easier great questions—of the multiverse.
Humans were dumb, but not too dumb to ask dumb questions. That they were too dumb to answer dumb questions is beside the point. Some such dumb questions that humans happened to ask themselves and each other were:
Why are we here?
What is the purpose of Stonehenge?
Who built the Moai of Easter Island?
When did life begin on Earth [this question would be easily answered (three billion, seven hundred million years before the carpenter got nailed to a telephone pole) but for the aforementioned disaster of religion]?
And, finally, the great dumb question at hand, which this is all about. It’s a question which any chameleon could answer: Where.
Where, is the fundamental preamble to such common dumb questions as Where are we from, Where are we going, and, arguably, the most common dumb question on Earth. This question, which this is all about, is one which every human, philosopher and televangelist alike, was guilty of asking on a daily basis. It is:
Where the hell did my pen just go?
And the answer is one which every lizard knows.
