The End of Everything Forever

by Eirik Gumeny

  “You’re kidding me,” said Artemis.

  The scientist shrugged noncommittally.

  “None of this makes any fucking sense!”

  The other woman clicked her tongue and gave the god the finger guns. “Now you’re getting it.”

  “Here’s the check,” said the skinny blonde waitress, sliding the bill onto the table. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Holy shit,” said Jesus Christ, his eyes going wide as he picked up the tray. “Were these potatoes made out of gold or something?”

  “You’ve been here for, like, twelve hours. The big guy had, I dunno, four meals?”

  “Well, in that case,” began Thor, heaving himself up from the booth, “anyone up for a dine-and-dash?”

  “Guys,” said the waitress, “I’m still right –”

  She was suddenly alone.

  “Where’d they go?” She looked out the window, at the early Colonial Era pastoral scene before her. “And why am I even still working? Nadia, you’ve got to learn to prioritize.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Dice Was Loaded From the Start

  Queen Victoria XXX was walking aimlessly down the street, hands tight in the pockets of her hoodie, kicking an empty soda can, and then a rock, and then, accidentally, a small lizard, as reality held a fashion show around her.

  “Sorry!” she called after the lizard, the scaly green iguana-thing rolling end over end.

  The lizard turned into a cannonball and came to rest in an open field.

  The raven-haired royal replica suddenly found herself in the middle of the Revolutionary War. American forces marched past her, on their way to what used to be – and was again, apparently – Jersey City, and the Battle of Paulus Hook. Guns roared dully in the distance; plumes of smoke rose from the horizon.

  This, thought the clone, is bullshit.

  But it’s better than nothing, I guess.

  And nothing’s all I got coming for me.

  Fighting back tears, the cloned queen looked for somewhere to sit, then gave up and plopped down onto the grass, watching the soldiers soldier down the dirt road.

  It must be nice, she thought, having a soul. Having something to look forward to after you die. Even if you’re wrong. At least you’ve got that hope to get you through.

  But what have I got?

  I was created – created – from crumbling bones and leftover spit and science-magic. To be a politician, cutthroat and cold, with no one else’s interests in mind but mine. To be an assassin, violent and efficient, to take orders without a thought, to kill on command. To be a celebrity, to make women want me and men want to be me.

  I was created with someone else’s life inside of mine.

  And, yeah, I’ve played the roles, gone along for the ride, sometimes willingly, sometimes without even knowing. But they’re not me.

  Not really.

  Not entirely.

  I’ve been a mercenary and a stoner and a housewife. Sort of. I’ve punched and I’ve screwed and I’ve screamed and I’ve cried and I’ve loved and I’ve lost and I’ve saved the friggin’ world and I’ve done nothing at all and I still ...

  I still don’t know who I am, not really.

  I never bothered to figure that out, did I?

  I was so tangled up with my programming, with Charlie, and then ... Then I just kind of gave up, took some time to figure things out.

  Time.

  I always thought I’d have more time.

  The queen looked up at the sky, at the clouds churning towards oblivion.

  But I don’t get that, do I?

  She raised a middle finger, long and hard and proud.

  Eat a dick, universe.

  Reality shimmered. Queen Victoria XXX was in Secaucus again, sitting on a bus stop bench. Nine years earlier. (Or two-hundred-and-fifty-nine years later, depending on which way you’re doing the math.)

  “Great,” she grumbled at the black hole, “now when the –”

  Her eyes went wide.

  In front of her was her: Queen Victoria XXX, shortly after being released from the Aussichtslos Drogensucht Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung survivor dorms, shortly after murdering all the other Victorian clones. Green – and a little red and purple, from the brawling – and on her own for the first time. Still in a vintage long coat, velvet and lace everywhere, her hair immaculate.

  “– fuck.”

  “God damn it,” said the Queen Victoria XXX from the past. She grabbed the closest parking meter with both hands, started wrenching it free from the sidewalk. “I thought I took care of all of you.”

  “No, I’m not ...” The queen not trying to murder herself put up her hands. “I’m not another clone, I’m ... I’m you – actual you – from the future.”

  “What?”

  Current Queen Victoria XXX pointed a finger toward the sky, toward the roiling, electric blue hole inexorably undoing the entirety of existence.

  “I don’t understand what that has to do with anything,” said the other one.

  “It’s a ... Shit. You haven’t seen a time anomaly yet. And Charlie hasn’t made you take a beginner astrophysics course at the community college.”

  “Charlie? Who the fuck is Charlie?”

  “All right, look.” The slightly older dark-skinned monarch lifted up the edge of her t-shirt, showed off the minefield of tiny, faded scars across her stomach. “Remember? When Susan B. Anthony III ambushed us? I bet that was last week for you.”

  The younger clone absently put a hand to her abdomen. “How ...”

  “I told you, I’m you.”

  “Yeah, no, but seriously: how?”

  “Space is weird?”

  “OK,” said the previous version of the political impersonation, shaking her head. “OK, all right, but, even if that’s true ... then, what?”

  “I, uh, I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly planning this.”

  The Queen Victoria XXX from ten years earlier, not yet raging against her programming, still unsusceptible to existential crises, simply shrugged.

  “OK. Then I’m just gonna –”

  “No,” said the more reasonable clone, “don’t ...”

  “Why not?”

  “I ... I don’t know. I just feel like I should ...”

  “What? Give me some advice? How badly did you screw up our life?”

  “No, it’s not – It’s not that,” she said. “Well, maybe ...”

  “Super helpful, lady.”

  “Look, just ... don’t ... don’t do what I did,” she said. “Because we know how that turns out, and ... and it hurts. And then it’s over. So, try something different, anything different. Kiss that girl at the bar. That dog you adopt? He’s actually a bomb. Brussels sprouts aren’t anywhere as terrible as you think, stop leaving your iPod in the car, and, if you and Thor end up fighting a terrorist penguin cell, don’t let him throw the black hole generator into an interdimensional tear in the sky.”

  Queen Victoria XXX, the one from the past, raised an eyebrow.

  Queen Victoria XXX, the current one, wrinkled hers.

  “And don’t ... don’t fall in love with Charlie, with Chester A. Arthur XVII,” she continued. “I mean, maybe it’s worth it, but, honestly, right now, I’m ... I’m not sure. I don’t have anything to compare it against.

  “Or do fall in love with him,” she continued, “but don’t let him die. And, I mean, that’s gonna be hard because he dies aaalll the time.”

  “Chester A. Arthur XVII? The boy scout-y nerd?”

  “He’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to you.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Man,” said the younger Queen Victoria XXX, leaning an elbow on the parking meter, “you are seriously bumming me out right now, me. I kinda figured we’d just, I don’t know, make out or something, but, Jesus Christ.”

  “We actually don’t use ‘Jesus Christ’ as a swear anymore,” explained t
he other clone. “Turns out he’s a good dude. He sells us our weed. Well, gives. I honestly don’t remember the last time we paid him.”

  “Wait, we’re on drugs in the future? What the hell kind of –”

  But Queen Victoria XXX was gone again.

  Secaucus was West New New York again.

  Queen Victoria XXX was alone again.

  “I really miss not feeling feelings,” she mumbled, curling up on top of the bench.

  A few minutes later and half a block away, Judy Lin, Jesus Christ and Thor Odinson turned a corner. Seeing the queen, the blonde man jogged closer.

  “There you are,” said the Norseman. “Are you – What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t fucking take this anymore,” growled the queen, getting up and squeezing him and resting her head on his shoulder.

  The thunder god put his arms around her, gently.

  “That sounds,” he said, “like a cue to get blackout drunk.”

  “That sounds amazing,” she said, sniffling. Then: “Why are you covered in mashed potatoes?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  [Insert .gif of Futurama’s Bender Going “Doooooooooooooommmeeeddd!”]

  There had been twenty-seven-and-a-half apocalypses to date. People had survived so much, so many times, they thought they could survive anything.

  The Antarctic supercolliders the planet had used to shift the Earth’s orbit decades earlier, to avoid an asteroid, the ones that had rocked the planet so hard they ended up ending the world for the second time all on their own, were dusted off and turned on.

  Other scientists with other time-quickening quantum cores strapped other gods to other rockets, tried every other thing they could think of. Bombs and theoretical isotopes and busses full of experimental monkeys were tossed into the black hole; artificial supernovas, all of Earth’s potatoes, and anything that sucked real hard, like industrial vacuums and Seth McFarlane’s exhumed corpse. A few industrious Swiss engineers even managed to create a new black hole inside the first one, acting under the premise that they’d simply cancel one another out.

  They did not.

  Nothing, in fact, did anything.

  In a desperate Hail Mary, a distress beacon was hurled into space – on the opposite side of the planet from the black hole, obviously – the hope being that maybe some heretofore unknown alien race was looking for a new species to adopt or enslave.

  The black hole, meanwhile, kept getting bigger.

  The Earth kept being doomed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Like It’s 1999

  “So,” asked Queen Victoria XXX, shouting over the din of the bar, “we’re sure we’re fucked, right?”

  “Incontrovertibly,” answered Judy Lin, once more bag-free.

  “I don’t know what that means,” said Thor Odinson.

  “Like, completely and totally, brother,” said Jesus Christ.

  “OK.”

  “And there’s no chance that past me might get her shit together and save us all?” asked the cloned queen, crowding closer to her friends. The tavern was packed tighter than a tin of polyamorous sardines prone to orgies and into anal play.

  “Probably not,” explained the scientist. “All the instances of the past appearing are, as near as I can tell, more like visions than actionable moments of our reality. Maybe there’s some alternate timeline where we don’t all die horribly, but not the one we’re in. I mean, you don’t have a memory of telling yourself stuff, right?”

  “Oh. Uh, no.”

  “Then there you go.” Judy paused, then shouted: “Hey, can I keep hanging out with you guys? I feel like you’d really know how to have a good time.”

  “Sure,” replied the clone, shrugging. “But before we get started –” Queen Victoria XXX pulled a folded-up liability waiver from the back pocket of her jeans. “– we’re legally required to have you sign this.”

  “For real?”

  “When we go on a tear,” she explained, “we go on a motherfucking tear. And I’m gonna tear this tear a new one.”

  “Yeah, but, the doom, remember?”

  “Look,” said Thor, “we don’t want you or your family suing us for damages or wrongful death or whatever in the meantime and ruining our last couple of days.”

  “Fair enough,” replied the scientist, pulling a pen from her coat pocket.

  “So does this mean you guys are cashing out?” asked Abraham Lincoln XVI, leaning closer to the trio.

  “For real, man?” asked the thunder god.

  “What?” replied the bartender. The last of the surviving Lincolns, Abraham Lincoln XVI was a lanky, gnarled leather tree of a man, the result of some questionable genetics and an increasingly unfair life.[liv] “Weren’t you the ones going on about not wanting your last days ruined?”

  “Yeah,” said Thor, “but we were talking about us.”

  “Abe,” added Queen Victoria XXX, “what in our entire history makes you think that we’re going to pay you right now?”

  “Or that we even have that kind of money,” added the thunder god.

  There was a glint in the dead president’s good eye. “I was really hoping you were gonna say that.” He began rolling up his sleeves.

  “If this is going to get violent, man, then I’m leaving,” said Jesus Christ.

  “Hot damn,” said Thor, draining his beer mug and then smashing it against the bar top. “Now it’s a fucking party.”

  Abraham Lincoln XVI punched the god in the face.

  Judy Lin threw a tumbler at the president’s head. Queen Victoria XXX tackled the scientist to the floor. Thor grabbed her stool and hurled it across the room. Abraham Lincoln XVI smashed a whiskey bottle over the Norseman’s blonde head.

  Then a man in the back said “Everyone attack!” and it turned into a barroom blitz.

  It was electric.

  So frantically hectic.

  It was like lightning.

  Everybody was fighting.

  So then someone put Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” on the jukebox and everybody started hitting everybody else in perfect time with the song.

  “Right,” said the Prince of Peace, putting down the rest of his Scotch. A plate and a half-eaten hamburger sailed over his shoulder. “I’m outta here.”

  ***

  Flames were rising from the collapsed frame of Honest Abe’s Taphouse, stained glass windows bubbling and popping. As thick smoke twisted into the air, a few stragglers could still be seen crawling out from the wreckage, bruised and scratched and bleeding, while dozens of other patrons were on the sidewalk, pouring one out for their homies.

  “So,” asked Abraham Lincoln XVI, wiping blood from his face, “where to next?”

  “We’re going dancing,” said Queen Victoria XXX.

  ***

  Barefoot, sweating, her jacket somewhere else, Queen Victoria XXX danced like no one was watching.

  Then she danced like everyone was watching.

  She was, quite literally, a dancing queen.

  She busted a move.

  Her hips didn’t lie.

  She shaked her groove thing.

  She shaked her bon-bon.

  She shake, shake, shaked her booty.

  There was a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

  She danced with the one that brought her.

  She danced with somebody.

  She was dancing with herself.

  She shut up and danced.

  She just danced.

  Ella bailó.

  She turned the beat around.

  She danced like the rhythm was gonna get her.

  She danced until there was blood on the dance floor.

  She danced until there was a murder on the dance floor. DJ, she was gonna burn this god damned house right down.

  She was a maniac, a maniac.

  The police were called, but no one answered.

  The music was killed, the lights were shut off.

  The roof, the roof was on fire.

  But Qu
een Victoria XXX kept dancing, dancing in the dark.

  The groove was in her heart.

  She was dancing on the ceiling, as it fell down around her.

  She was dancing in the street.

  She was dancing in the moonlight.

  Then Thor grabbed her by the shoulder.

  Flames were rising from the collapsed frame of the Warehouse dance club, cement toppling inwards, rebar jutting into the night, all of it lit up purple and red and blue by a handful of strobe lights still flashing inside.

  “Oh. Well, that got out of hand,” said Queen Victoria XXX, breathing heavily, wiping someone else’s blood from her face. “Where to next?”

  “I think I know a place,” said Thor.

  ***

  “Thor!” shouted the Neo-Vikings at the bar, raising their glasses.

  “Sorry about that,” said the thunder god to his friends, in a not unsubtle humblebrag, “I’m kind of a –”

  “Vicky!” roared the entire tavern, cheering. “Huzzah!” Steins clanked together.

  “Mine’s bigger,” said the queen over her shoulder as she sauntered past.

  ***

  The Norse God of Thunder threw open the door to the “men’s room,” otherwise known as a filthy back alley that was only hosed down once a week, unless it rained. He found Judy Lin squatting in the corner, pants around her knees, holding onto the chain-link fence for support.

  “What?” she asked.

  “There’s an actual ladies’ room in there,” said Thor, pointing with his thumb, “with plumbing and everything.”

  “There was a line,” she explained with a small shrug, “and those Viking women ...”

  “Good point,” said the thunder god, settling in a respectable distance away and undoing his fly. “I actually had a thing with a Viking woman once. Man, could she wreck up an outhouse.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m serious. Back in the day ...”

  ***

  Thor Odinson pulled open the door to the bar and found himself in the mid-1800s.

  “This isn’t McSorley’s,” he grumbled. “Is it?”