The Great Yippie-Kai War

Every now and then, with its worn covers staring me in the face, the Book of the Future taunts me to turn a few pages and see what's going on outside this moment. Now, the Book of the Future is a a funny creature (yes, that's right - it's a living document, always sneaking in changes like repagination and outline formatting to fool with me).

The Book of the Future is a misnomer. The book is just a bundle of pages stuck inside an electric pencil sharpener. To read the pages, I have to find a certain kind of wood used to make a wraparound for sticks of graphite. Then, I push the pencil into the sharpener and pull out the reels of shaven wood. There, written in the woodgrain, are the messages that the book delivers.

The book belongs to someone else. I found the book in a ditch when I was biking through my childhood neighbourhood, not far from the house of an eccentric old lady who made me mow her lawn with an electric lawnmower.

Inside the book, instructions detailed how to create more pages to the story. You make the pencil shavings and then glue them together using the glue formula found on page 123. At first, I couldn't find page 123 and then I realized there was no page 123. I had to create it! But that's a story for another time.

Today, I've flipped open the book and gone back to the pages that someone else had written. There, between pages delta-x 47 and adhmad mór, I found the following short chapter:

Scientists from the Astronomy Sector of Silicon Woods, the southeastern housing estate bordering the dark side of the Moon, reported a signal trace of familiar origins. According to the scientists' calculations, the signal, a broadcast sent sometime in the seventh millennium of the modern era, appears to have bounced back from the edge of our universe.

Amateur astronomers are encouraged to point their radio antennae to the same spot in the sky to help further define the edge of space.

If what they see is correct, our universe is part of a oil drop floating along the gutter in a rainfall event in the local township on a planet in a larger universe. But that's just speculation, scientists' theories driven by their reading of pulp science fiction. You can rest assured we will dispel this theory in no time.

In further news, scientists have finally unlocked the secrets of space travel hidden in beer. For those willing to become lab subjects, more research is available. Stop at your local pub to become volunteers.